10 ways Brands Use Social Media Listening for Competitor Analysis.

Competitor analysis: 10 points to observe:

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1. Carry out an audit of your brand before any competitive intelligence process to facilitate your positioning and the priorities of future monitoring areas.?

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2. Segment, then define your front-end, indirect, and potential incoming competitors, all of which should be synthesized into a map that will be updated annually.

Establish your mapping of priority sources whose new publications are to be analysed first, and then complete with all the other sources, including the publications of your competition (corporate, scientific sites, marketing presentations, exhibitions, webinars, blogs, network patents), consumer conversations (consumer opinions, social networks, forums, blogs, etc.), media publications (national, regional, generalist and specialised media articles, product tests), social accounts, influencer blogs, and opinion leaders, sector analysis sites (market sites, consulting firms, polling institutes) and more.?

List your keywords thinking "broadly": brands, subsidiaries, products, and technologies in the professional language ("customer experience", "customer relationship") and consumer language ("I called the customer service number").?

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5. Monitor your entire environment:?

• Monitor more than your competitors, i.e. also major players, who are not direct competitors,
• Monitor owned media (the publications of your competitors) as well as earned media (the publications of journalists, customers, and consumers of your competitors).?

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6. Monitor your competitor's language. It's not enough to just monitor in English. If their first language is Korean, it will be necessary to integrate the language for effective competitive intelligence.

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7. Organise your competitive themes to facilitate analysis: from the start of the collection of messages or data, it's advisable to think of files or classification tags to facilitate subsequent analysis: classification by competitors, regions, financial data, R&D, sales, marketing.. tagging by analysis objective: SWOT, product benchmark, sentiment comparison, campaign performance, etc.?

8. Thinking "field" and internal information, social competitive intelligence must be supplemented by field monitoring from events but also from your colleagues:?

• Events: One of the few times when you can physically approach your competitors is at the trade shows and conferences they attend. Consider sending collaborators to collect and listen to these competitors. Again, each employee must have a specific objective for the type of information to be gathered.

9. Cross-reference data to put information into perspective

Analysis support tools can highlight clues by automatically comparing thousands of pieces of information. Thus, a client came across hundreds of job offers from a competitor in several countries. Via an email-generated matrix, they analysed them by type of profile and noticed, for example, that many engineer profiles were recruited in China, presaging an increase in production in this country for a certain product.

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10. Synthesise your information in dashboards before dissemination

It's necessary to compile and share the information you have collected. The 1st level of synthesis is carried out, thanks to dynamic dashboards that bring together a few essential views of the essential information on a competitor: share of voice, new products, recent articles, buzz, and matrix of benchmarks. Advantages of the dashboard: it's a work tool, but also a communication document that you can share with your colleagues.?

Customer case study and competitive analysis?

Context:

A client in the construction tools and equipment industry develops, manufactures, and markets products for the renovation, construction, maintenance, and mining industries, primarily for professional end users. Bosch, Ryobi, and Black & Decker are their main competitors.?

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Objective:?

Identify purchase criteria to detect product improvement opportunities.

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Solution

The company used a listening tool to? produce in-depth market analysis reports and performance benchmarks, captured on social media and the web. It monitored different product lines and their competitors, such as cordless power tools, hammers, or saws.

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The objective is to identify the purchasing criteria among competitors based on location, products launched, and pricing models they develop to identify opportunities for product improvement. They also monitored post-purchase positive/negative feedback and created reports to inform their product development department about finding gaps and improving functionality (regarding battery accessibility, grip, etc.).

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