Social Media for Competitive Analysis

It’s an area that businesses often struggle with when it comes to online marketing. We are referring to your social media strategy. Everything from choosing the right social media platforms, to creating new profiles can be intimidating. The good news is that your business doesn’t have to come up with a brand new concept in social media strategy. The best place to begin is analyzing your competitors on social media. In order to scope out your competition, there are several areas for you to analyze on their social media profiles.

Let’s get started! You have your profiles set up and ready to go! You’re excited and anxious to start sharing content, but you want to have a plan of action. Begin by identifying your competitors. You want to find businesses that are similar to yours and don’t limit yourself to a specific size. For example, if you are an auto repair shop, you’ll want to include those businesses that offer similar services to what you offer, both large and small scale.

Competitor Profile Checklist 

• Take a look at the wording used in their bios. Because you are limited in the number of characters to describe your business, you’ll want it to make a great statement about who you are and what you offer. Notice any keywords they are using. And always include your URL to increase your website traffic.
• What images are your competitors using? Social media places a huge emphasis on the  use of images that goes well beyond your cover and profile photos. The use of images can go a long way in branding your social media presence. Take a look at how your competition uses images and come up with a creative spin for your own profile.
• If you happen to be a full-service auto repair company, you offer a plethora of different services, but you’ll want to highlight select offerings. See what your competitors are listing as far as individual products and services. People researching your industry may choose to contact you over a competitor based on the list of services that you offer.
• Create content for your social media updates. Scope out your competition’s use of content and whether they share content that is exclusively their own or if they branch out and include content from other industry websites. We suggest a mix of the two! When checking the competition, look for what content is getting the most engagement to decide on an approach for your business.
• Another key component is timing. How often are your competitors posting content?  If your business is local audience focused, try to post when your audience is likely to be online. If you are targeting a worldwide audience, then you will need to experiment to see when your posts get the most engagement. And keep in mind that as your followers engage with you, it’s of the utmost importance for you to respond, even if it’s just to say “thanks”.

We hope that this checklist will help you launch your new social media profiles. If you already have your social media platforms established, keep in mind that it never hurts to update yourself on what your competition is up to.

What do you tend to look for when analyzing your competition on social media?