As a social media marketer, what’s the first activity that you propose to do for your new client or employer? If you’re like most of us, you propose an audit. Even in the worst case, you try to assess the what’s the current status of their social media.
While audits do provide insights, they often are devoid of key focus areas. Like an audit doesn’t always assess the current social strengths. Sometimes, audits also don’t cover competitive analysis and new opportunities.
And that’s why brands need a SWOT analysis of social marketing for business.
SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate a business or project’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
It involves identifying and analyzing the internal and external factors that can impact the success of an initiative. The acronym SWOT stands for Strengths (internal positive attributes), Weaknesses (negative internal attributes), Opportunities (external positive factors), and Threats (external negative aspects). By conducting a SWOT analysis, businesses can gain insight into their current position and make informed decisions about future strategies.
That’s why the acronym SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
You may ask, why SWOT analysis is important. If you have worked at any corporate firm, you already know this is a crucial and periodic exercise. And mostly for business objectives and competitive research. It involves processes, SWOT tools, and skilled professionals going through a SWOT analysis cycle.
As social media managers, from time to time, you will be required to do a SWOT analysis of the brand you’re working with. Some of you are already doing it but maybe under a different name. Let’s say, social media audit. This involves both qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Here’s how it can help:
Here are some examples of opportunities in SWOT analysis:
When conducting SWOT using Vaizle, not only you can see the data that you need, but you can also see it from multiple perspectives, especially in comparison to your competitors (or your client’s competitor if you’re a social media service provider).
But how do you go about a social media SWOT analysis for business?
To make it easier, we will take an example throughout this blog post and show you how you can audit and do a social media audit for a brand.
Let’s imagine you want to perform a SWOT analysis of social marketing initiative or campaign.
You can easily do a comprehensive Social media SWOT analysis of your brand using Vaizle.
Here is how we broke down each quadrant in a social media SWOT analysis to determine the specifics of each. Let’s see an example of a SWOT Analysis.
I have chosen Zara as the audit brand with two competitors H&M and Forever21.
I will be using Vaizle – A Social Media Analytics Tool for this example and show you at the same time how you can use it to do a brand’s SWOT analysis.
Social Media is all about experimenting, and Vaizle makes it easy to examine, compile, and understand the landscape.
The first thing to ask is: what is already working well for you? Those are SWOT analysis strengths for you. Through the analytics tool and your own experience in the market, look for your strong points.
You can easily conclude from the below pie chart:
The most obvious advantage of social media is a brand’s content and therefore the audience’s engagement with it. Since social media is mostly consumed by scrolling, powerful content is the one that’ll stop the scroll. Engaging content is one of the SWOT analysis strengths you can rely on.
Using Vaizle, I can see that Zara is doing well in terms of the content types they are pushing out. They are experimenting with videos and text to garner an engagement similar to their competitors.
Zara has displayed their feed to be professional, posh, and candid, which works well with the brand identity. They stand out amongst their competitors because of their imagery having this chosen personality.
Looking at the feed of content on Vaizle, I can also see that they are experimenting with photos, videos, and links.
Another strength that social media marketers like me can harp on is the platform. Platform usage and choice are critical in getting into consumers’ minds.
Now, within content distribution, their strength is different platforms for different use cases. For example, videos do well on Facebook, and photos on Instagram. They have figured out this part, as far as I can tell from Vaizle’s analytics. Vaizle will tell you which platform to post.
Another strong point for ZARA is its Social media hashtags. These help garner attention and reach, which is a strength when used effectively.
When we talk about hashtag usage on Instagram, Zara has variety.
#zarawoman was used 84 times and #zarabeauty was used 47 times on Instagram. Unlike its other competitors, Zara seems to be experimenting with its social media strategies and content.
Although assessing SWOT analysis weaknesses isn’t anyone’s favorite thing to do, doing it does help a brand see where there is potential to learn, grow and implement from competitors. Using Vaizle, you can not only identify SWOT analysis weaknesses for yourself but also for your competitors. Turn your competitor’s weakness into your strength.
When I use Vaizle for SWOT analysis weaknesses, I sorted the stats for video particularly based on engagement.
What I noticed was that their engagement on videos was much lesser/less frequent than their competitors. This goes to show that even though they are trying out the video format, they aren’t able to garner effective engagement around it.
When they do put out relevant content, their video does well! For example, on July 7th they linked one of their content to FIFA and on that day there was a spike in engagement!
I suggest that they go back to their video strategy and fortify it for their audience.
Tip: Proven Strategies for creating social media videos.
Zara is really struggling in terms of engagement or growth on the Twitter platform. Twitter has emerged as a customer support hub for brands. Many brands have set up direct Twitter channels to address the concerns of their customers.
Zara has negligible customer engagement on Twitter.
Fun fact: 47% of Zara’s fans are on Instagram!
Tip: Best tips for twitter marketing
Moving on to hashtags, using Vaizle, I found out that their strategy is to use one or two hashtags per post.
Not using a hashtag on Twitter is mainly the cause of super low engagement on their posts on Twitter.
While this is in line with brand values, it is harming them and is a weakness since their posts don’t get the intended reach and visibility it deserves.
Opportunities are generally low-hanging fruit for a brand to grab onto!
When assessing Zara’s opportunities with SWOT analysis marketing and using the benchmarking abilities of Vaizle, I noticed minor tweaks that will cause big brand impacts immediately.
Using Vaizle and the segmentation it offers, filtering by the kind of engagement – comments are a space where Zara can step in and engage with their audience, unlike the competing brands. As Instagram evolves, they are placing more weight on comments than likes. Zara’s visual imagery/content should illicit a comment!
For example, H&M caught on the #StrangerThings campaign whereas Forever21 caught on the festival outfit trend. For Zara, this just means they need to be more aware and engaging about real-life incidences to garner results like their competitors.
This goes to say that quirky, uplifting, and reposted content does well when used within the strategy. This also goes to show that appealing to the target audience with hashtags is a sustainable strategy.
When assessing threats, for a brand, it is an assessment of where competitors might take over. It could be a certain content type, for example, it could be their engagement – there’s something to envy in that brand!
Plan your social media campaign taking worst-case scenarios into account. Keeping an eye out for obstacles to your social media marketing goals is always a good idea.
When I used Vaizle to find Zara’s threats, I looked at the best-performing brand to assess their niche strengths, by default, become a threat to Zara. Vaizle helped me keep track of what and more importantly when their strengths showed. Let’s say, a video that had a very good response! With Vaizle, I can see what the content was and when, so I can backtrack.
Here are the threats data suggests for Zara:
Being an engaging brand means that they are active and engaging with its audience better than a competitor. In this case, social media SWOT analysis by Vaizle gave me the insight that engagement is a constant battle and yet, is one that H&M is winning.
Posting content is half the game, the other, being engagement.
As your audience keeps seeing your brand, again and again, the top-of-funnel recall and memory increase.
Secondly, looping back to the first point about followers, Zara is not the one with the highest number of followers.
This is a SWOT analysis weakness because they are now fighting with this limited range of people for attention. Had it been a strength, they would be envied. Right now, it’s a threat that they are not growing followers as much as other brands.
Hopefully, you were able to understand the flow of auditing and performing a SWOT analysis of the social media industry. You can build upon this strategy and even add more parameters.
However, using Vaizle effectively does help social media managers, like me, not just keep tabs on competitors, but be market aware.
Here’s a summary of what I just did with Vaizle’s competitive analysis tool:
Conducting such an in-depth SWOT analysis of the social media industry isn’t possible with a manual Excel-based stack. The efficiency and clarity Vaizle provides are unmatched!
How do you perform social media SWOT analysis? Feel free to share your suggestions on your approach or ask any questions about our audit process.
Arushi is a proficient SEO and ASO specialist with a 5-year track record working for B2B and B2C organizations. Currently, she is heading SEO strategy for Vaizle and helping businesses improve their online presence. A mountain girl at heart, she likes to recharge her creative abilities by taking long walks and listening to podcasts.