What are your thoughts about your competitors? Do you see them as opponents? Or as important sources of information about the customer landscape? 

Competitor analysis is an important element in making well-informed decisions. You can design better decision-making by developing a systematic learning plan that incorporates your wins and losses, as well as the strengths and shortcomings of your competitors.

Why is Social Media Competitor Analysis Essential?

Competitor analysis shows you the mirror where you stand. 

A comprehensive social media competitor analysis approach can assist your company in answering some of today’s most difficult challenges. 

Why is it that your competitors outperform you? What are they doing that makes them popular among your target demographic? What are they doing to harm the brand’s image? What are they doing to keep their ranking on the SERPs? And how are they doing it?

Finally, competitor analysis provides you with the facts you need to make data-driven decisions and construct more effective marketing, development, and sales plans for the future.

A good social media competition analysis technique can help you: 

• Identify market gaps and address segments that are underserved.

• To increase market share, you must first understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competition.

• To achieve long-term change, make use of documented trends and track records.

• Determine the best focus areas for current and future investments.

But why is competitor research so important?

Competitor analysis gets to the bottom of the million-dollar issue. Why is your target audience preferring your competitors over you? 

How to Research Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy

Keep a close eye on the competition by following the seven suggestions below.

1. Identify your competitors
2. Examine the profiles of your competitors
3. Take a look at their blogs and newsletters
4. Examine their most popular content
5. Frequency (and timing) with which your competitors post updates
6. Watch out for any new content
7. Keep an eye on their social media activity

Identify your competitors

The big names aren’t your only opponents. Consider emerging players to get the information you need to counter possible new threats to your market share and position. It’s critical to include both direct and indirect competition to get a complete picture of where you stand.

Direct rivals are companies who operate in the same or related industries as you and offer the same or similar products and services. You’ll almost always be targeting the same demographics and solving the same client problem.

Indirect competitors exist when there are significant gaps between your offerings, target market, or industry. However, you work in the same general field and may be able to share useful knowledge.

Find the Google keywords that are relevant to your company or project. Choose the results that appear at the top and search for them on social media.

Selecting your competition is the first stage in developing a competitive social media strategy.

You can add your competitors to your landscape if you have a Vaizle account. Creating a competitive landscape will aid your initial research as well as subsequent monitoring. If you don’t already have one, you can start a free trial by booking a demo right now with no credit card required.

Examine the profiles of your competitors

Solid social accounts and pages are the foundation of a successful social media campaign. Here are a few things to look at while doing a social media audit of competitors to discover how your competitors have set up their social media profiles.

In their social profiles, how do your competitors phrase things?

Because you normally only have 200 characters to describe your company to a first-time visitor, you’ll want it to be brief and highlight the value you provide. Examine what your competitors have to say about their businesses, paying special attention to the keywords they use.

And, regardless of what your competitors do, include your URL in your description to enhance the amount of traffic you can get from those networks.

This strategy works especially well on Twitter and Instagram because the URL in your profile is only shown in certain portions of the site, such as search results.

What pictures do your competitors use?

Telling your brand story through images is the most effective way to get your message across. 

While images have always been an important part of social media, every platform now allows you to share native videos with your followers.

All of the images you post contribute to the branding of your social media presence. Look at how your competitors use photos and come up with a unique strategy to brand your own.

You can see all of your competitor’s photo and video posts in a single grid using Vaizle. 

Through Vaizle, you can filter social media posts in the grid view by content type (picture, video, etc. ), rival (to spot branding patterns, campaigns, etc. ), or engagement rate and total. A vital aspect of any social media strategy is to use the correct photos and video content.

Do your competitors post photos, videos, or other forms of media in their updates?

Videos get the highest engagement on Facebook, and other social media platforms allow you to share native videos to keep your audience interested and expanding. Examine the performance of peers’ media type enhanced updates to see if your target audience would be interested.

Identify the keywords they’re using

Vaizle, for example, can show you the keywords your competitors are using for paid and organic results. Once this information is exposed, use it to your advantage. You can utilize it to determine any keywords they may be currently missing out on and take advantage of the opportunity to target these terms.

Take a look at their blogs and newsletters

Monitoring your competitors’ blog content can help you come up with new ideas for your own. If they have a newsletter, sign up for it to stay up to date on their latest posts. Create rules in your inbox to guarantee that their emails are routed to specific folders, which you can then browse through at your leisure. Make a note of any themes that are performing well in order to assist you to create your own calendar. Consider how you may add something similar into any regular posts that perform well.

Examine their most popular content

Users can utilize Vaizle to look for the most socially shared material by type or brand. You’ll be presented with a list of content ranked by popularity after entering a subject or phrase. 

This reveals the efforts your competitors are putting into maintaining their social media presence, both qualitatively and quantitatively. That is what we can classify as the core purpose of conducting social media competitor analysis.

Additionally, this tool is excellent for highlighting your competitor’s top content. 

Frequency (and timing) with which your competitors post updates

Timing is an important aspect of social media content. If you’re targeting a local audience, you should post updates when they’re most likely to be online. If you want to reach a global audience, you’ll have to experiment with when your updates get the most attention.

Even better, you can utilize Vaizle to monitor how many updates your competitors publish in a certain period of time.

Watch out for any new content

Google Alerts is a simple—and free—way to keep track of your competitors. Set up notifications for certain keywords and branded alerts for your competitors to see who is frequently appearing on them. To track sentiment and manage brand reputation, you should also create notifications for your own branded phrases.

Keep an eye on their social media activity

Observe your competitors’ social media channels and postings to see what they’re sharing, how they’re communicating with customers, and which themes are performing well—and poorly—for them.

There are several options for accomplishing this, the simplest and least expensive of which is to create Facebook and Twitter lists. Before categorizing your competitors into lists, like or follow their pages on important social media networks (you may wish to do this from a personal profile rather than your business profile). 

You can quickly monitor their content by visiting the list on a frequent basis, rather than visiting their profile page or relying on it appearing in your timeline organically.

Use a social media analytics tool like Vaizle to perform Social Media SWOT Analysis on your competitors. It allows you to set up streams focusing on certain profile pages as well as hashtags.

Conclusion

Regular competition analysis will help you stay on top of what’s trending in your sector, from analyzing your competitor’s keywords and rankings to monitoring their blog and social posts.

You’ll be well on your way to ensuring your content remains stronger than the rest if you keep an eye on what your competitors are doing across all verticals.

Remember that, while your initial competitive research will equip you with a plethora of data, you must continue to monitor them on a frequent basis. This will provide you with information on any adjustments they make to their plan.

Using a marketing intelligence tool like Vaizle helps you to swiftly and effectively monitor changes made by your competition, ensuring you don’t miss anything.