How do you identify and track your social media competitors and their strategies?

In my experience small businesses have no idea about any of those metrics. Before planning and implementing it for them, there has to be a tactful introduction of how they should actually be planning a social strategy, not just posting randomly when they have the time, or there is an event, as they would on their personal page.

Having a social strategy that is tied into the wider marketing mix is important! Many skip over the strategy element when tackling social content & planning. However, the strategy should be a driving force to set out the guiding principles across brand, editorial and community. Briefs to creators, designers and even budget allocation should all link back to the strategy. This will help in terms of tracking defined metrics and whether or not the strategy is working over a period of time.

This ^^^ is something that all business owners and CEOs should know. When I ask my new clients for this list of 5/6 competitors, it might take them a few minutes to talk it through. I never assume that I know who their competition is until after I've worked with them for a bit.

Facebook Ad Library is a great way to be able to quickly and easily view all of the ads currently being run by your competitors on their Facebook and Instagram: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/

Lately I've been using Fanpage Karma to track the performance of my clients' competitors. Not only is it useful for the audit part of strategy development, I get pushed a daily summary of metrics via email each morning so I can keep track, at a glance. There are both free and paid subscriptions, depending how deep you want to go.

Top Tip: Socialinsider has a built-in tool to do a competitor analysis. You can build a dashboard that displays your social content as well as the content of your competition, and it will display the top posts, too. If you are a data and visual person, this is the tool for you!

Social listening tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social will help you track your competitors, keywords, and hashtags. If you don't want to use a tool, you can use features native to each platform, like Twitter lists. Set up groupings so you can track competitors in one feed and select hashtags or keywords in another. Track what posts are getting engagement from audiences, and work similar content with your own unique spin into your calendar. By watching to see what's successful and popular with your competitors and in relevant topics, you'll be setting yourself up for a greater chance of success.

It's often a good strategy to chime in discussions that mention your competitors on social media. In that case you will need a social media listening platform that alerts you in real-time like kwatch.io when your competitor is mentioned on Linkedin, Reddit, Twitter, etc.

As mentioned above, the benchmarking tool to use is Socialinsider. Once set up, yo'll have a custom dashboard with your competitor that is updated in real-time and will allow you to monitor their socials from one place.

Use your competition as inspiration to do better. use their ideas as inspiration to create content that is better, most focused, and delivers more value.

It's important to remember that social media engagement is only one part of the equation. Capitalizing on that engagement and converting it over to leads and sales is often the ultimate goal — how successful your competitors are in this area won't always be clear with monitoring alone. Be sure to look at their website and other touch points to see what they're doing well. Having highly engaged social content won't mean much if the audience has a bad or confusing post-click experience.