How to Spy on Your Competitors Using Social Media

Measuring your brand’s success on social media isn’t just about seeing how well it’s performing in a vacuum. It’s really important to understand how you measure up against your competitors, as this will not only give you a better understanding of your position but also teach you some valuable lessons.

Among the things you’ll discover during your social media competitor analysis are:

• Who your social media competitors are
• Which social media platforms work well for your industry
• How others are using social media networks to the best effect
• Where you stand against the competition
• What social media threats there are to your business
• Where the gaps are in your social media strategy

What you need is a competitor analysis to gain insights into your industry and inform your social media strategy for the future. While it may seem like a daunting task, breaking it down into steps will make it more manageable.

1. Determine who your social media competitors are

Identifying who your brand’s main social media competitors are means more than just looking at the biggest names in your sector. You want to determine which businesses in your field use social media actively and put it at the heart of their marketing strategy. These are the companies you should be benchmarking yourself against and conducting a competitor analysis on, as such brands will give you the most useful insight. Aim to choose five competitors to focus on.

2. Identify which social media networks get the most attention from followers

An important part of any social media strategy is identifying where your customers are. There’s no point ploughing lots of resources into a platform that your target audience rarely uses. Look to see where your competitors have a presence and the kind of results they’re getting. If none of the businesses within your industry are doing well on a particular platform, then it’s probably not you but the users that are the defining factor.

3. Collect the data

Gathering together all the data can be time consuming, so you may wish to use a third party competitor analysis tool. There are plenty of them available and which one you choose will depend on the networks you’re looking into and the capabilities of the tool itself. A good auditing tool should save you time over entering the data manually, offer up extra information such as calculating engagement rates and present the information in easy-to-process reports.

4. Apply the same yardstick to your own social media presence

For any meaningful comparison you must analyse your own brand’s presence on social media in the same way you have that of your competitors. It’s worth looking for strong trends at this point, such as which social networks are worth targeting and the ratios of types of content posted. You’re not looking to copy your competitors’ strategies verbatim, but see which lessons can be learned without having to go through the process of trial and error yourself.

5. Apply the SWOT framework to your analysis

Using the SWOT framework (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) is an effective way to obtain actionable takeaways from your competitor analysis. The first two factors refer to elements that are internal to a brand and therefore the business has control over. The latter two are external factors within the industry and the wider world that a company must be aware of. Use each of these titles to create lists about your brand with reference to your competitors to distill the essence of what should be included in your social media strategy.

6. Bake social media competitor analysis into your quarterly cycle

Once you’ve completed your first social media competitor analysis, it should start to be clear how useful it is. To ensure you get the most out of it and keep up to date on industry best practices, you need to carry out such analyses regularly. Include them in your quarterly reporting and review schedule, so you can keep track of the progress you’re making and update your strategy based on the outcomes of your SWOT lists.