How can you harness competitive analysis to improve your social media strategy?

Harnessing competitive analysis for your social media strategy involves studying your competitors' social media activities and learning from their successes and failures. Start by identifying key competitors in your industry. Analyze their content, engagement, posting frequency, and follower demographics to understand what resonates with their audience. Look for gaps or opportunities they might have missed. Use this knowledge to refine your own content strategy, focusing on what works best for your target audience. Additionally, keep an eye on emerging trends and innovations within your industry, and adapt your strategy accordingly. Continuous monitoring and adjustment based on competitive insights can help you stay ahead.

As a competitor many entrepreneurs will have a harsher outlook on their competitors content and performance than their own. (Don’t do this) Following your competitors is a great way to combat this and allow you to look externally on what you think is performing bad and good. Sometimes we as humans have a self serving bias which allows us to take personal credit when good things happen but blame negative outcomes on external factors. This can poorly effect business. When following others in our niche on social media and allowing their content to casually pop up in our feeds, we are able to judge their content as a normal consumer would and are able to learn what we like and don’t like without letting our own egos get in the way.

The goal of almost any competitive analysis is to uncover meaningful opportunities for growth. Some of us from agencies or consultancies often think of competitive audits as trite or tired, but the truth is they often just aren't executed in a pointed enough way. Here are a few angles to focus in on with a competitive audit: (1) Deep-diving into innovation - e.g., patent analysis (2) Media analysis - e.g., social listening (3) Defining a new business strategy - e.g., expanded category exploration

There is an old saying, why re-invent the wheel? Professionals learn from each other, IMHO there is no harm in imbibing what others are doing good. I do follow my innovative competitors to grab new trends. It saves a lot of time and I can always customize/improve to my benefits.

The industry is ever-evolving and by following your competitors, you stay informed, you stay relevant and you can strategize on what to do differently!

We use tools such as Crunchbase, Sales Navigator, Spyfu. Look out for 'similar companies' sections in these tools and it helps us see who our competition is and who is our client's competition as well. This tactic contributes to our larger prospecting and outreach strategy.

Many of us can identify our near competitors by looking around at what products or services are target customers are buying when they aren't choosing us. Often times, a more interesting exercise is to find the out of category, unexpected brands that could be pulling customers away. @Dan Runcie recently brought this concept to life through the example of Apple's Beats headphones. “Beats wasn’t competing with Bose, it was competing with Jordan..” Don’t let your brand get stuck in an old frame that doesn’t serve its aspiration (in the case of Beats, it was to be a lifestyle brand rather than a piece of hardware.)

The most important thing to remember is that analytics will never tell the full story. While looking at your competitor's content from an analytic standpoint (likes, comments, saves, shares, etc) is a great indicator of whether or not it resonated with the target audience, it doesn't capture the full picture on whether or not a piece of content did what it was intended to do. Some of my highest-converting posts look like complete flops to the outside world. If a competitor was analyzing my content and saw that one specific post only received a few likes and no comments, they may think that's not the correct strategy to follow, but internally that post was a massive win. Everything has two sides!

Drawing from my experience, analyzing competitors' engagement involves strategic steps and powerful tools. Tools like SocialBee unveil engagement rates, while content scrutiny offers insights into their strategies. SEMrush and Ahrefs uncover SEO tactics via ranked keywords. Backlink analysis reveals link-building efforts. Brandwatch and social metrics gauge sentiment and social engagement. Studying likes, comments, shares, and retweets provides a gauge of their social impact. SimilarWeb estimates their reach, while demographics insights aid audience understanding. This journey informs your engagement tactics, equipping you to outperform rivals and elevate engagement strategies.

I think the most important part of social media competitor analysis is really looking into the audience that company is addressing. While they may have a similar target market, your ICP and their value to business revenue could be very different. Always look into the demographics; and go beyond age, gender, etc- to look into purchase behavior, challenges, purchase power, engagement rate, etc. You can actually do this through market research and BI tools - for instance, Radarr is really helpful for analysing social audiences.