Knowing your rivals and staying ahead of them on social media is essential for any digital marketing plan.

It’s a lot easier to make educated judgements and plan strategically if you know what your rivals are up to. An in-depth competition study on social media: these are the steps to take.

This article will teach you how to evaluate your social media performance in relation to benchmarks in your field, allowing you to fine-tune your approach across all platforms.

Analyzing the competition: what is it and how do you do it?

Each company, in any sector, may benefit from doing a competitive study. The term “competitive intelligence” refers to the practise of studying the business practises of your top rivals and industry leaders.

If you want to keep score and evaluate the competition, you get to specify the parameters. Determining specific metrics or strategic responses to evaluate depends on the goals of your research. Such instances are as follows:

Examining the pages of your rivals is an excellent way to get ideas on how to enhance your own website.
Examine other products or services that fill a comparable niche to yours before releasing anything new.
Check out the going rates in the market for similar goods and services if you want to make any price changes.
Pay attention to what leading businesses in your sector are doing on social media if you want to improve your own social media marketing (a topic we’ll be covering in detail below).
Consistent characteristics should be used as yardsticks in all circumstances. These are the criteria that will serve as benchmarks to evaluate your progress.

To what end, though, must you spend so much time monitoring the activities of your rivals?

Just to put things in perspective. Visualize an increase of 5 percent in your Instagram engagement rate over the course of a month. Do you think it’s good, awful, or just okay?

You won’t be able to interpret your results or establish meaningful Goals for future improvement until you know how you stack up against competitors in your industry.

Analyzing your competition on social media: how to do it?

Let’s start with the fact that we know studying the competition is worthwhile. How, then, do you map out the steps? When do you even start?

Just like what qualifies as a competitive analysis is up for grabs, so too is the method you employ to conduct one. Yet a fundamental structure is applicable to most circumstances, regardless of how in-depth your investigation goes.

The following is a checklist for your social media competition study.

Research the market

You need to identify your rivals before you can begin gathering information. Though most companies already know their rivals, it never hurts to do a fast Google search in case you find some fresh ideas.

If you’re looking for more companies like it, especially in your neighbourhood, an excellent place to start is Google. Do a search for terms that describe your company (product lines, industries served, etc.) and analyse the results carefully.

Pay attention to the companies that are truly in your field of competition, those who are comparable to you in terms of size and scope and thus likely to have similar resources.
Find the rivals on the major social networks after you have a list of promising ones. Finding the contact information of your rivals is as easy as visiting their websites.

Finding out where your rivals are active on social media might help you choose which networks are most suited for your company’s needs at this stage.

Last but not least, check sure no major companies in your market were overlooked by conducting platform-specific searches. Do a hashtag search on Twitter and Instagram to uncover which company pages are making use of the terms.

Choose your units of measurement carefully

With your list of rivals in hand, it’s time to decide what you hope to learn from your research. Make a decision as to what aspects of the competition’s actions you will track. What follows is what has to be emphasised in any social media analysis.

You should monitor the likes, comments, shares, retweets, mentions, and overall activity of your rivals’ audiences (numbers). That’s the best way to establish achievable goals for development.
Features – do any of your rivals provide a place to buy their products on Facebook? Can you tell whether they’re making use of Instagram’s shoppable posts? Is boosted material the norm for their feed updates or do they (over)use it? Keeping tabs on this will highlight leading practises in the sector.
How often they publish, what they post, and what kind of stuff they post. Publish they Stories? Is there a pattern to the most popular kinds of posts they make across platforms? How frequently are new entries made? Check the data to discover if your content strategy is useful.
Consider the tone and style of your rivals’ social media posts. What kind of response do they get from their target audience? Not everyone must conform to the same standards. But, if you are familiar with their tone, you may conduct a basic sentiment analysis and learn more about your target demographic.

You need to hone your social tactics

Using what you’ve learned from your examination of the competition is the last phase. You don’t need to and shouldn’t mimic your competitors’ social media activity, as I’ve already explained. Instead, you should adjust your approach to social media in light of the standards and recommendations you’ve set.

Experiment with including different forms of content that have proven successful in your business. Try out new calls to action if you find that they increase participation.