SWOT analysis is like that corporate buzzword everyone knows of but rarely puts into action.
However, it is what helps you strategically plan upcoming actions and puts your current performance in context with competitors.
That’s probably why social media managers or marketers are often tasked with running social media SWOT analysis for any client before beginning a new project.
If you’re also stuck in the same situation and have zero clue of how to proceed, you’ve landed at the right place!
In this article, I will walk you through the complete social media SWOT analysis process along with an example!
Social media SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is a detailed framework that gives an overview of your business’s current social performance against competitors. Additionally, it also helps you spot any growth opportunities and adjust the marketing strategy accordingly to maximize your potential.
You can conduct SWOT analysis for the entire organization or for a specific internal department or an ongoing project.
SWOT analysis is usually performed in a grid-like structure with four quadrants and answers various questions. Here are the different parts that make up the entire analytical process:
| STRENGTHS What is your company doing right? What are the competitive advantages? | WEAKNESSES What negative attributes do you need to focus on to reach your objectives? What shortcomings should you first work on to get positive results? |
| OPPORTUNITIES can you leverage external factors that will benefit your organization? What particular market trends should you capitalize on? | THREATS What external factors can negatively impact your results? How can you minimize the damage? |
Now, let’s consider some examples for the answers you might get after social media SWOT analysis:
Cool, now that you know what SWOT is, you see how it is a pretty straightforward business tool! It basically puts your social performance in perspective and gives you directions for future strategy planning.
However, it can sometimes be tempting to skip the social media SWOT analysis step and rely on your intuition. I’d recommend not doing that. Here’s why:
SWOT analysis is like an honest assessment of your social media marketing efforts and can be as thorough as you want.
Usually, you’d need to go ahead with these 6 steps:
A detailed social media SWOT analysis can bring in a lot of information. Not all of that is going to be useful for you.
As such, you need to know what your main goal is. Do you want to expand your business or test the market potential of a new product?
Find what is already working well for your social media profiles. Are you creating content that is the resonating with the target audience or do you have the benefit of a strong brand reputation?
You can use free social media analytics tools by Vaizle to get an overview of your account performance and how you’re performing as compared to your competitors.
If you’re anything like me, you’d almost feel like forgoing this step. But trust the process, this is essential for your organization’s long-term success.
Start by spotting areas where your competitors are performing better and strategies that aren’t yielding any satisfactory results.
Moving ahead, you’re required to consider external factors that aren’t in your control but are going to impact your performance anyhow.
Find any market trends that can help you gain a strategic edge over your competitors and analyze if you’re missing reaching out to any specific market segments.
This step is undoubtedly the most challenging one and is a ‘what if’ situation. You need to find out what possible market changes are going to impact your business negatively.
However, I’d advise you not to get too lost in the damage control process before threats have actually the entered the market landscape.
By now, you must have gathered plenty of information in each quadrant.
The next task is to delete any pointers that aren’t synced with your social media SWOT analysis goals right now.
If you’re working with a brand, it is quite possible that you will be asked to conduct a social media SWOT analysis before moving ahead with the marketing phase!
Using Vaizle’s Social Media Competitive Analysis tool, you can easily conduct a SWOT analysis and gauge the status of current social media performance.
For this blog, I am considering Netflix to be the audit brand with two competitors HBO Max and Hulu.
Here’s what we already know about Netflix!
Now, that we have clarified the market position of Netflix, let’s move ahead with our social media SWOT analysis.
Before beginning, I am adding these 3 brands to the Vaizle landscape. All you need to do is enter the brand name, select their official Facebook and Instagram accounts, and you’re all set to get started!
Let’s first check brand activity and engagement share and check where Netflix is most active right now.
We can see that Netflix gains most of its brand engagement, i.e., 93%, from Instagram (despite being equally active on both platforms.)
To conclude:
HBO Max is consistently the most active brand and is utilizing social platforms well to connect with its followers.
Additionally, Netflix’s video engagement is also down as compared to both the competitors (where Hulu is doing well amongst the selected brands).
To conclude:
Using Vaizle’s segmentation for Top Posts, I can see that Hulu and Max post video clips that gain the most amplification (shares).
Netflix can also add more content bits or teaser clips that can prompt users to share their posts on their timelines.
Even for photo posts, HBO Max is the brand with most the engagement and amplification.
To conclude:
Given that Netflix has a massive social following (compared to Hulu and HBO Max), their engagement numbers don’t justify this gap.
Using the Fans Change feature in Vaizle’s Cross Channel analysis, I can see that Netflix’s fans growth in the past few days has been less than that of Hulu and HBO Max.
To conclude:
If you’ve never conducted a social media SWOT analysis before, the entire process might seem a bit overwhelming. That’s what I thought so too till I tried Vaizle’s Competitive Social Media Analysis tool to conduct Netflix’s SWOT analysis.
Hopefully, this guide was able to walk you through the social media SWOT analysis process and gain relevant insights for your future marketing strategies. All you need to do is add a self-brand and selected competitors, and Vaizle will fetch the data in a clear and easy-to-understand dashboard with visual graphs.
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SWOT analysis for a social media page is a framework to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of any social media page. Based on this analysis, you can further make data-driven decisions and benchmark your current performance against competitors in the relevant niche.
Threats in social media SWOT analysis can be anything that is not in your control but can’t negatively impact your performance. A few examples are algorithmic changes, negative comments, or falling industry trends.
Strengths and weaknesses of social media SWOT analysis are positive and negative factors that impact your social performance and are in your control. For example: low brand engagement can be a weakness that you can work on.
Opportunities in social media SWOT analysis are factors that are not dependent on your actions but can still improve your results.
Himanshu is an SEO Executive with 7 years of work experience and MBA in Marketing. His core expertise lies in crafting impactful SEO strategies for growing B2B organizations and bringing organic traffic to their social and web channels! He is also a fitness freak with a knack for athleticism and you'll often find him spending his off hours in a gym.
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