social media analysis of competitors

Social Media Competitor Analysis: Template + Guide for 2024

Social media competitor analysis will help you identify gaps in your strategy and stay one step ahead of everyone else.

Table of Contents

How do you stay ahead of the competition and win on social media? Start with a social media competitive analysis.

It will tell you how you stack up against others in your industry, and surface new opportunities as well as potential threats .

This guide will teach you how to analyze — and learn from — competitor performance. We’ll also list the best social media competitive analysis tools and give you a free template to help you get started.

More of a visual learner? Check out our video to find out how to perform a competitive analysis on social media in just three steps:

What is a social media competitor analysis?

A social media competitor analysis is an analysis  of your  competition on social media to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how those strengths and weaknesses compare to your own.

It’s a process of benchmarking your own results against the heavy-hitters in your industry, so you can identify opportunities for growth as well as strategies that aren’t performing as well as they should.

A social media competitive analysis, specifically, will help you:

• Identify who your competitors are on social media
• Know which social media platforms they’re on
• Know how they’re using those platforms
• Understand how well their social and content strategies are working
• Benchmark your social results against the competition
• Identify social threats to your business
• Find gaps in your own social presence

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The benefits of running a competitor analysis on social media

Learning about your competitors is not the only reason to do a competitor analysis on social media. It will also give you deeper insights into your own business and your audience (which likely overlaps with your competitors’ audiences).

Here are some surprising insights a social media competitive analysis can give you:

• Performance benchmarks for your own business, such as average followers, engagement rates, and share of voice
• Ideas for the best times to post on social media (since your audience is likely online at a similar time)
• An understanding of the potential customer pain points
• New (and better) ideas for content that may resonate with your audience (or that, conversely, does NOT resonate with your audience, and which you might want to avoid)
• An understanding of how to communicate with your audience on certain platforms (i.e., casually or formally)
• Ideas for ways to differentiate your brand

Ultimately, a social media competitive analysis will give you as much as you put into it. You may choose to do a one-off social media competitor report or hire someone on your team whose sole job it would be to keep track of your competitors. Most businesses do something in-between: a quarterly or monthly competitor analysis report.

Whatever level of analysis you choose, the insights will be invaluable.

How to do a social media competitor analysis in 4 steps

Before you start, download this free social media competitor analysis template to keep track of your efforts.

Bonus: Get a free, customizable competitive analysis template to easily size up the competition and identify opportunities for your brand to pull ahead.

Step 1. Find your competitors

Identify your competitive keywords.

You probably already know some of the keywords your business is trying to rank for in the search engines. For example, if you work for a Manhattan-based hotel, you’re likely focused on keywords such as “New York hotels,” and “best places to stay in Manhattan.”

But if your property is a boutique hotel with evening wine tastings and local art, you’re not necessarily competing directly with the Holiday Inn. Having a thorough understanding of keywords relevant to your product offering will help you develop a clear picture of who you’re really competing against online.

The  Google Adwords Keyword Planner  is a great place to identify the keywords most relevant to your brand. Even if you don’t advertise with Google Adwords, this tool is free to use.

To start, use the tool to analyze your website. You’ll get a list of relevant keywords, along with the average monthly searches and estimated level of competition.

Or, you can enter your known target keywords into the tool. Again, you’ll get a list of related keywords with data on search volume and competition. Use these related keywords to help you narrow your definition of your competitors, so you can make sure you’re analyzing businesses that are truly competing with your own.

Check who’s ranking for those keywords in Google

Choose the top five or 10 keywords that have the most relevance to your business, and plug them into Google. You’ll soon get a sense of who your top competition is online.

Pay special attention to the brands in your industry that are paying for Google ads to get their names above the organic search results, as they’re putting their money where their marketing ambitions are. Even if they don’t have great organic search rankings (yet), it’s worth checking out how they’re performing on social media.

Click through to the websites of any brands that appear to be potential competitors. Most businesses link to their social channels in the header or the footer of their website. Enter the links to their social profiles in your competitive analysis spreadsheet.

Check who appears in social searches for those keywords

The brands that rank for your keywords in Google are not necessarily the same ones that rank well within the social networks themselves. Since this is a social media competitive analysis, you need to see who comes up tops in social search results, too.

For example, head to Instagram and enter your keyword in the search box. Then, browse the “For you” feed and take note of the brands that show up there.

You may have heard that TikTok has become Gen Z’s favorite search engine . So, if you’re trying to reach a younger audience, make sure to run a search there too.

For more tips on searching the various social networks, check out our post on the  best ways to research online .

Find out what similar brands your audience follows

Facebook Audience Insights and X (Twitter) Analytics can give you some good insights into which other brands your audience follows on these social networks. If these brands are similar to yours, it’s worth considering them as potential competitors.

To find which brands your audience follows on Facebook:

• Open  Facebook Audience Insights
• Scroll down to Top p ages 

You may find that none of the Pages identified are relevant to your industry, but if they are, add them to your list of competitors.

On X, rather than checking on your whole audience, you can check to see who your top followers are connected to.

• Open X Analytics.
• Scroll down to each of your  Top Followers  for the last several months
• Click  View profile  for each Top Follower
• Click  Following  on their profile to see the full list of accounts they’re following, or click  Tweets & replies  to see which accounts they interact with

Choose up to 5 competitors to focus on

By now you’ve got a huge list of potential direct and indirect competitors — far more than you could reasonably include in a thorough competitive analysis. It’s time to narrow down your list to the top three to five brands who you are most closely competing with on social media. Choose the brands that have the closest fit to your target markets.

Step 2. Gather intel

Now that you know who your competition is, you need to learn what they’re up to on social media.

Click through to the social networks of each of the brands you’ve identified as top competitors. As mentioned above, you can usually find these links in the header or footer of their website. In your social media competitive analysis template, make note of the following:

• What social networks are they on?
• How large is their following and how fast is it growing?
• Who are their top followers?
• How often do they post?
• What is their engagement rate?
• What is their social share of voice?
• What hashtags do they use most often?
• How many hashtags do they use?

You can find much of this information about your competitors just by clicking around their social profiles. For more streamlined data gathering, check out the analytics tools mentioned below.

Don’t forget to track all of these things for your own social channels as well. This will help you with your analysis in the next step.

Step 3. Do a SWOT analysis

Now that you’ve gathered all that data, it’s time to analyze it in a way that helps you understand where you stand compared to the competition. As part of this analysis, you’ll also look for potential ways to improve your social marketing strategy , and potential hazards to watch out for along the way.

A SWOT analysis is a great tool to help you think clearly about all of this information. In a SWOT analysis, you take a hard look at your business and the competition to identify: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

The important thing to know is that strengths and weaknesses involve factors internal to your brand. Basically, these are things you’re doing right, and areas where you could stand to improve.

Opportunities and threats are based on external factors: things happening in your competitive environment that you need to be aware of.

Here are some items to list in each quadrant of the SWOT template.

List metrics for which your numbers are higher than the competition. This is your competitive advantage!

List metrics for which your numbers are lagging behind the competition. These are areas you’ll want to focus on improving through  testing  and tweaks to your social media strategic plans.

Keep in mind that you could have both strengths and weaknesses for each social network. For example, maybe your Facebook follower count is higher than your competitors, but they have better follower growth. Or maybe you have fewer Instagram followers but higher engagement.

Get quite specific here, because these distinctions will help you identify your opportunities and threats.

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Opportunities

Now that you can see at a glance where you stand compared to the competition, you can identify potential opportunities to take advantage of.

These opportunities might be areas where you think you could improve compared to your competition based on information you’ve already gathered, or they could be based on anticipated or recent changes in the social media world.

Like opportunities, threats come from outside your organization. To get a keen sense of upcoming threats, take a good look at numbers related to growth, or anything that signifies change over time.

For example, a competitor that is small but has a high follower growth rate might present a bigger threat that a large competitor with stagnant growth.

This is another area where you need to keep an eye on the broader industry for upcoming changes that could affect your position compared to your competitors. The Hootsuite  State of Digital Reports  are a great source of industry information to consider.

Step 4. Set up s ocial media monitoring to track competitors on an ongoing basis

You’ll need to revisit your social media competitive analysis regularly to keep it current. Make this a regular part of your quarterly or annual reporting and review. That means you’ll need a constant supply of up-to-date information.

Putting a solid  social media monitoring strategy  in place will equip you with that real-time data to incorporate in your next analysis. This is an especially useful strategy for identifying potential opportunities and threats.

We’ll go over some tools you can use for social media monitoring below. Basically, it’s all about being aware of social conversations involving your brand (and product or service), your competitors, and your industry.

Record any important information or events you uncover through social media monitoring in the Notes column of your competitive analysis template, and incorporate them into your revised opportunities and threats during your next review.

8 top social media competitor analysis tools

In step 2, we talked about how to gather intelligence directly from the social networks. Here are some of the best social media competitive analysis tools that will do the digging for you.

Best social media competitor analysis tools

1. competitive analysis in hootsuite analytics.

Whether you’re running a full competitive analysis or just browsing for inspiration, look no further. Hootsuite Analytics does Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter) competitive analysis for you. You can track up to 20 competitor profiles per network, and get a clear view of your strengths and weaknesses — plus actionable insights on the top posts, hashtags, and types of content in your niche.

Follow these 4 simple steps to analyze competitors with Hootsuite:

• Sign in to your Hootsuite account and pick Analytics from the main menu on the left side of the dashboard.
• Then, click on Competitive analysis in the Benchmarking section.
• At the top of the page, use the dropdown list of your social profiles to select the one you want to compare to competitors. 
• Then, pick the competitors you want to measure your social media performance against. To do that, go into the second dropdown list and check the boxes next to the competitors you want to view. To add competitors, click Manage competitors at the bottom of the dropdown box. 

Type the name of a competitor into the search bar and select the correct profile from the dropdown list. Depending on your Hootsuite plan, you can add between 2 and 20 social accounts per network (Facebook, Instagram, and X) to your watchlist.

And that’s it! Now you can browse several competitive reports, including:

Overview , where you can see the number of posts you and your competitors posted in the selected timeframe (that can be adjusted in the top right corner of the dashboard) as well as every account’s posting frequency, average engagement, number of followers, and audience growth rate.

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Post performance , where you can review your and your competitors’ top posts and sort results by likes, comments, and engagement — and quickly fetch inspiration for what to publish next.

Performance by post type , where you can find out what types of posts — photos, videos, carousels, or Reels — are most popular with each brand’s audience. Results can be sorted to show which post types get the most likes, comments, or engagement.

Post performance (by comments, likes, or estimated engagement) , where you can see how you and your competitors did every day within the specified timeframe — all in one easy-to-read graph. You can drill down results by post type, or stick to the overall view.

Trending hashtags … which speaks for itself.

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Post length , where you can find out how many characters and hashtags, on average, your competitors use in their posts.

Learn more about competitive analysis in Hootsuite Analytics . The feature is available in all paid plans.

2. Industry benchmarking in Hootsuite Analytics

If you want to see how your results shape up against your industry as a whole (rather than individual competitors), this is the perfect tool for you.

With Hootsuite’s social media benchmarking , you can find out how others in your industry are doing on social and compare your results with just a few clicks. 

To get industry benchmarks, follow these steps:

• Sign in to your Hootsuite dashboard and head to Analytics.
• In the menu on the left side of the screen, scroll to Benchmarking and click Industry .
• Pick an industry that best describes your business. 

That’s it! Now you can see how your results compare to average performance stats within your industry. You can set up custom timeframes, switch between networks — Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok — and look up benchmarks for the following metrics:

• Profile impressions
• Profile reach
• Audience growth rate
• Engagement rate
• Video plays
• Posting frequency

… and more.

You will also find resources to improve your performance right in the summary section:

And, if you need to present your results to your team, boss, or other stakeholders, you can easily download your comparison report as a PDF file. 

3. Hootsuite Streams

Hootsuite Streams is a powerful tool that allows you to track keywords, competitors, and hashtags across every social network—all from one easy-to-use dashboard. The simplest use case? Add all your competitors accounts to one Stream and check on it whenever you want. But you can do much more than that.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers some powerful competitive analysis tools. One of the most important is its easy-to-understand graphic showing your brand’s social share of voice .

Social share of voice is a measure of how much people talk about your brand online compared to how much they talk about your competitors. This is one of the metrics you should track in your social media competitive analysis template.

Brandwatch integrates with Hootsuite. Here’s a video showing how the two applications work together to provide key competitive analysis information.

5. Synapview

Ready to go beyond  social media  competitive analysis? Synapview is an app that lets you monitor competitors and hashtags on Reddit and blogs too.

6. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a social media monitoring tool that is also great for doing a social media competitive analysis. You can discover everything that is being said about your brand, your competitors, or any keyword on X, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest and all web sources (news, blogs, etc.).

Plus, it has a handy “sentiment analysis” feature, so you can see not only  what  is being said about your competitors but  how  it is being said.

PS: Mentionlytics integrates with Hootsuite so you can see everything it pulls in your Streams.

7. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is primarily known as a social listening tool with a huge library of insights – competitive or otherwise – of over 150 million sources, including blogs, forums, videos, news, reviews, and social networks.

Use it if you want to spy on your competitors beyond just social media, and if you want to keep tabs on what the entire industry is saying in general. It’s great for high level overviews as well as detailed analyses.

8. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management tool that offers some competitive analysis features. Sprout’s tools help users track and measure growth across competitors’ social accounts and easily check how those stats compare to their own. A word cloud solution that surfaces trending topics and keywords is also available.

Source: Sprout Social

Check out our detailed side-by-side comparison to see how Sprout Social stacks up against Hootsuite.

Free social media competitor analysis template

You could create your own spreadsheet to keep track of all the information you gather during your social media competitive analysis.

But if you’d rather get straight to work collecting data and putting it to use, download our free social media competitive analysis template and just start plugging in the information you collect. There’s a tab for your SWOT analysis, too.

Use Hootsuite to crush the competition on social media. From a single dashboard you can manage all your profiles, track competitors and relevant conversations, improve performance, and much more. Try it free today.

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Christina Newberry is an award-winning writer and editor whose greatest passions include food, travel, urban gardening, and the Oxford comma—not necessarily in that order.

Karolina Mikolajczyk is a Senior Inbound Marketing Strategist and associate editor of the Hootsuite blog. After completing her Master’s degree in English, Karolina launched her marketing career in 2014. Before joining Hootsuite in 2021, she worked with digital marketing agencies, SaaS startups, and international corporations, helping businesses and social media content creators grow their online presence and improve conversions through SEO and content marketing strategies.

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How to perform a social media competitive analysis (+ free template)

Written by by Carly Hill

Published on  February 13, 2023

Reading time  10 minutes

They say self comparison is the thief of joy. But when it comes to social media, your channels don’t perform in a vacuum. You need to keep an eye on competitors to truly understand how your channels are doing and whether you stand apart.

Competitive analysis is more than just comparing yourself to others. And it’s definitely not about copying the competition. By analyzing the competition with a social media competitive analysis, you uncover valuable insights that empower you to improve your social strategy, and your entire business. After all, keeping an eye on the competition has cross-org benefits.

So how do you start? Don’t worry, we’ve boiled down the process into five simple steps.

How to perform a social media competitive analysis?

• Identify your social media competitors
• Gather platform-specific data
• Analyze competitors’ social media strategy
• Step up your competitive analysis with social listening
• Using your social media competitive analysis template and data

Before we start: Download our social media competitive analysis template to maximize the use of this article and make it even easier to follow these steps. We’ll be referencing this resource throughout the article to help you as you go.

1. Identify your social media competitors

Over half of respondents to a Gartner survey said choosing a well-known brand is less important than it was three years ago. Having a big, recognizable brand is no longer enough to stand out. But first, you need to know who you’re trying to stand out from.

Look to brands in your industry who are active on social media. These are brands whom you can learn from and benchmark against.

Your direct competitors on social are brands that sell the same products as you. Let’s use our fictional coffee company, Sprout Coffee, as an example: La Colombe, Peet’s Coffee, Caribou and local coffee shops are all direct competitors.

But also take note of indirect competitors . These brands may not sell the same product, but fill a similar need and reach a similar audience. For Sprout Coffee, that would be grocery stores or local cafes selling food and coffee.

How to ID your social media competition

For lack of a better term: Google it! Searching for the keywords consumers would use to find your business is one of the best ways to uncover competitors . For Sprout Coffee, you might Google “ground coffee” or “instant coffee.”

Look for websites that are in your specific industry. In our example, La Colombe and Folgers could be good options. Then, explore their active social channels. For instance, Peet’s Coffee is a popular coffee company that’s very active on social media, so it makes sense to add them to our analysis as well.

To get more specific to your audience, perform some market research or competitive monitoring . With social media listening,  you’ll uncover conversations your audience is having about you, your industry and your competition—even when your handles aren’t tagged.

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2. Gather platform-specific data

This is where social media intelligence comes in. Tracking how your competitors are performing on social requires you to look at each platform individually.

And this is not a one-and-done process. To keep your finger on the pulse of your competition, and to set competitive benchmarks , refresh this data quarterly or biannually alongside your larger social media reports.

This process can take a lot of time if you’re in a highly competitive industry. But the more thorough you are, the better results you’ll get. This is where a social media analytics tool is basically required.

Sprout’s competitive analysis tools provides you with a full, competitive picture. Combining the power of our Competitor Performance reports and listening tools, you’ll be able to aggregate your competitors’ social performance in one place for head-to-head comparisons and to help you understand your share of voice.

Let’s take a look at how to compare your brand to competitors’ social media presence on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook—the networks Sprout’s reports cover. Use these walkthroughs to guide what data you should pull for other networks too, like TikTok or LinkedIn.

Instagram competitive analysis

Start by doing a visual analysis of your competition’s Instagram account. Ask yourself:

• Do they use a link in bio tool ? How often are they updating it?
• About how often are they active on stories? What does that content look like?
• Do they have a brand-specific hashtag?
• What do they say in their bio to set themselves apart?
• Are they using Instagram highlights?

Level up by using Sprout’s Instagram Competitors Report to compare and benchmark your brand against competitors at a glance in key areas:

• Audience growth: Are your competitors growing their audience quicker than you?
• Media sent: How frequently are your competitors publishing? This can reveal whether you’re posting enough to keep your audience engaged.

• Engagement: How many likes and comments does your competitor content get?
• Hashtags: What hashtags do your competitors use to gain more exposure?
• Top posts: Try to get an idea of why these posts are performing well. Are they product photos? Do they use certain colors? Find out what these posts have that your content doesn’t and use the info to improve your images and videos.

Pro tip: Another tactic is to do a search for your competitors by hashtag on Instagram, like #Folgers, to see how many people are tagging your competitors in posts. If it’s a lot, that’s an indication the company is getting noticed and has an active following.

This will also give you a sense of what hashtags people use to refer to other brands and could potentially spark ideas for hashtags to use for your brand.

Once you have all the information from your Instagram competitive analysis research, make sure you add that data to your spreadsheet , like so:

Facebook competitive analysis

Start by doing a manual review of your competitor’s page, looking for the basics:

• Number of follows and page likes
• Any specific tabs or features they have. For example, some coffee roasters might have the shop section enabled. If we notice the same trend with other competitors, it’s likely a good sign it’s working for them.
• Look at their visuals and branding.
• Review their About section—how do they set their business and social presence apart?

A visual analysis is nice, but it only goes so deep. This is where Sprout’s Facebook Competitor Report comes in to judge how well the competition’s content performs over time.

Use this report to see how many messages your competitors send and receive, the types of content they post (text, images or videos), engagement and the amount of received messages. All of which answers higher-level questions about your competition’s presence, and how you can stand out from it.

Include this in your spreadsheet, as well as any specific metrics that are important to your strategy.

Twitter competitive analysis

Your Twitter analysis will look similar to your Facebook analysis.

Here are a few areas to take note of:

• Number of followers.
• Look at the visuals and branding of their cover image and profile picture. How often do they shift these visuals?
• Review their bio—what are they highlighting? How have they set themselves apart?
• Do they adjust their Twitter name (not their handle) for holidays like Halloween?

To see a more direct, automatic comparison between your Twitter account and your competitors, level up with Sprout’s Twitter analytics . This compares your Twitter profiles against each other, or a competitor. Select your Twitter account, then enter a competitor for the other slot.

The report shows engagement, influence, followers gained/lost and mentions. You can change the time period, but it’s best to stick to the last 30 days to keep the data relevant.

Once you’ve looked over all the competitive social media analysis from the Twitter report, be sure to enter the data into your spreadsheet. Tracking this information can be extremely valuable down the line.

Level up your data

Our spreadsheet and Sprout’s reports include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

But we recommend conducting a manual analysis of any additional platforms, like LinkedIn and TikTok, that are relevant to your brand and audience.

Also explore Sprout’s new competitor widgets available in the Professional and Advanced plans. These enable you to customize reports and include your data alongside competitor data in one, singular report.

3. Analyze competitors

Half of competitive intelligence is quantitative. But to get a true 360 view of your competitors’ social channels, you’ll need qualitative data on how your competitors use each platform.

Start analyzing your competitors’ social strategy by focusing on these three questions:

How active is the competition?

• What types of content do they publish?
• What’s their brand’s social persona ?

It’s fairly easy to gauge how active brands are by answering these questions:

• When was the last time they posted?
• Are there long spans of time between each post?
• Do they respond to comments?
• How in-depth are their responses to comments?

Brands should post at least once every couple of days to be considered active. But if your competitors post several times a day more than you, you risk falling behind. For example, Twitter allows for a lot more flexibility when it comes to how often to post —are your competitors significantly outpacing your daily Tweets?

Looking into all of this sheds light on their content strategy and customer care strategy—and where there are gaps.

What types of content do they post?

According to a Q1 2023 Sprout pulse survey, 53% cited changing content formats as a major challenge when planning and scheduling content.

Look at each competitor’s last 10 posts and calculate what percentage of them are promotional—prompt their audience to sign up, shop, etc.

This can also apply to the content formats they post. Are they posting a lot of video content? Mainly photos? Do they lean heavily on creators and user-generated content? How often do they jump on trending sounds or social media memes ?

Use this information to see what content formats they’re using to pull ahead to cut the guesswork out of your strategy.

What’s their brand persona?

Some marketers like to look at their competitor’s brand voice when doing a social media analysis. Voice describes the tone and POV a brand uses on social media. Do they post from the brand’s perspective (we) or do they let individuals post on the brand’s behalf.

For example, the tone of the Field Museum’s social account…

Clawing my way to the weekend. 💀 pic.twitter.com/Y1keGLFwB8 — Field Museum (@FieldMuseum) January 27, 2023

…is very different from the American Museum of Natural History’s tone. They each have their own online personalities .

It’s #FossilFriday ! Let’s swim back in time some 85 million years ago to the Late Cretaceous to meet Xiphactinus, a gigantic predatory fish. This species, which could reach lengths of 17 feet (5.2 meters), was capable of swallowing a 6-foot- (2-meter-) fish whole! pic.twitter.com/71JD3k1B5J — American Museum of Natural History (@AMNH) January 27, 2023

Level up: As you wrap up, take a look at your competitors’ websites, because content marketing and social media are closely related. A lot of companies repurpose their blogs for social media content. Take a look at your competition and see how many of them maximizing their bevy of content

Once you’ve gone through each competitor, say it with me: Put the data into your social media competitive analysis template.

4. Step up your social media competitive analysis with listening

If you’re new to social media competitive analysis, starting with our template will help you get familiar with your competitors’ social media performance and uncover patterns for you to tune into.

But if you’re ready to take your competitive analysis on social media a step further, tap into social listening. Social listening gives you a broader perspective of conversations related to your industry and competitors that are happening across social—even when you’re not tagged. Combined with Sprout’s network competitor reports, social listening expands your view and brings in conversations on YouTube, Reddit and the broader web.

It’s an invaluable tool to uncover gaps that you can fill, conversations to jump into and more. For example, Grammarly uses Sprout’s social listening tools to provide cross-team insights and analyze their competitive share of voice on social. In 2021, Sprout helped them identify that their brand owned 71% of their competitive share of voice.

Sprout’s built-in competitive analysis tools also make it easy to measure your competitors’ social presence and compare it to yours.

With this template, you can identify the top competitors you want to track and include specific profiles, keywords, phrases and hashtags that you want Sprout to listen to.

To see what Sprout’s social listening tools can do for your brand, request a demo to try it for yourself.

5. Using your social media competitive analysis template and data

Now that you’ve compiled all of this data, you need to put it to use. Using your brand’s social media analytics , you can compare your profiles to the competition. That’s why we included a line for your company’s data into our template .

Your final step is to interpret the data into something others will understand by going beyond simply sharing your filled-out template. With data storytelling , turn those raw numbers and insights into digestible and actionable takeaways.

Here are a few tips:

• Use visuals. Data visualizations, like the charts and graphs Sprout reports provide, break down data into digestible visuals.
• Identify the most interesting points and findings. Most don’t need (or want) to see every detail. What are the key findings from your social media competitive analysis?
• Predict questions or challenges. Get ahead by providing solutions and answers.
• Provide next steps. Doing a competitive analysis of social media is one thing. But defining the “what now?” is the whole reason for doing so. With what you’ve discovered, what are your next steps to improve your content and share of voice?

It’s important to keep in mind that this social media competitive analysis isn’t for you to copy exactly what everyone is doing. Instead, it will guide you toward getting started on the right foot.

Dive into the data with a social media competitive analysis

In the end, it’s all about comparing your brand’s metrics and data to the competition. Then make any necessary adjustments to get a leg up on your competitors.

You have the template. Now, make your social media competitive analysis less daunting and more automated by adding Sprout to your toolbox— try Sprout free for 30 days and learn how our competitive analysis reports will help you uncover deeper insights to optimize your strategy.

Start your free Sprout trial

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Published March 4 th 2022

How to Perform a Social Media Competitive Analysis: A Complete Guide

Learn how to stay ahead of your competition and be successful on social media.

Your brand’s journey on social media is unique, and so is your competitors’ experience. And there is such beauty in learning from each other. But how do you do that?

Whether you are a startup focusing on a niche or a big established corporation, social media competitive analysis will give you a powerful overview of your market and audience’s needs.

So, let’s dive into the world of benchmarking against competitors on social media.

What is social media competitive analysis?

Social media competitive analysis is your compass to building and maintaining a relevant digital strategy.

It is a systematic process of monitoring and analyzing information about your competitors’ content, customer service, and campaigns on social media. This will help you get insights into what works in your industry, areas you need to rethink, and ideas on how to upgrade your marketing plan.

Why should you do a social media competitive analysis?

Keeping an eye on your brand’s performance is crucial, but so is monitoring and analyzing your competitors . A social media competitive analysis will enable your brand to: 

• Identify and keep an eye on your competitors. 
• Understand which social networks they use. 
• Discover their audience profile and behavior. 
• Find out what is the best time to post. 
• Get inspired by their content.
•  Find gaps in your social media strategy and adapt it accordingly. 
• See where you rank in your industry. 
• Discover new market trends. 

The list goes on and on. Read on to get behind the scenes of how you can reveal all this precious information.

How to conduct a competitive analysis on social media?

Let’s discover the main steps you should undertake in order to perform a social media competitive analysis and improve your marketing strategies.

1. Identify your competitors on social media. 

The first step is to get to know your competition. Keep in mind that there are a couple of categories you should consider.

• Direct competitors  

Start by analyzing your direct competitors — you most probably share the same audience and offer similar products or services.

• Indirect competitors

Don’t forget to also investigate the indirect competition, which can be high-end or low-end substitutes in your industry. Such new insights can put the puzzle together about your audience.

A good way to start your competitor analysis is by a keyword search on Google. Check who is ranking against the 10 most relevant industry or product keywords that are relevant for your brand. This will give you an idea of who your top competition is. Also, pay attention to the brands who invest in Google ads in order to get their names on top of organic search. 

Pick the 5 most relevant brands and research them further on social media. It’s completely possible that search engines’ results differ from the social networks’ ones, so keep your eyes open for brands with similar target audiences and successful results.

2. Gather the relevant data on social media. 

Now that you’ve found your competitor group, it’s time to dig deeper into their strengths and weaknesses on social media. 

You should address questions like:

• What social channels do they use?
• How large is their following and how fast does it grow?
• How often do they post?
• What kind of content do they offer?
• How does the audience engage with their posts?
• What kind of hashtags do they use?
• How fast do they respond to comments and engage with the community?
• What makes them unique?

The metrics you want to follow also depend on the goals and development stage of your business. If you are a new start up you might want to focus on building your fanbase first, but if you are an established company – engagement could be a leading metric to follow.

You can also use tools for more in-depth analysis and easily follow your competitors’ marketing strategies more closely. 

For example, with Benchmark you can monitor your competitors’ posts, campaigns, hashtags, and user interactions. Monitor your competitors and learn from their ideas, successes, and failures just as you would your own.

3. Benchmark your results against the competition. 

After gathering all this useful data, it’s a good idea to organize it into an excel spreadsheet or explore the options of using more intelligent tools to save time and get deeper insights.

This is the time to take the next step towards building your social media strategy and consider:

• Which metrics indicate growth?
• What content works for your competitors and what doesn’t? And why?
• Is there consistency in their social media strategy?
• Are there any trends that are affecting your brand?

You can also use the S.W.O.T. analysis to create a clear overview of where you stand against your competitors and understand your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats better. This will help you adapt and upgrade your social media strategy.

It’s important to identify your own brand’s strengths and weaknesses as well as perform a social audit at least every six months. With tools like Benchmark , you can understand which parts of your social media strategy are contributing to your success as well as discover opportunities and potential weaknesses.

A very special aspect to consider is to benchmark your content strategy against the competition. Are your competitors offering original, curated, or promotional content on social media? Do they focus on inspirational or educational posts? What kind of formats do they use?

This can bring a data-driven change in your own content strategy and thus, engage better your community.

4. Define the right strategy and tools to help you progress. 

Based on the information gathered and your smart analysis, it’s now time to formulate your social media strategy.

But the hard work with competitive analysis doesn’t stop at this point. You need to carry on such research at least every six months in order to stay up to date with all trends.

There are two ways you can handle it — manually or via sophisticated tools. You should consider the following weekly metrics related to: 

• Audience  
• Content  
• Engagement  
• Paid media  

Another opportunity for your business is to use a specialized tool like Benchmark and thus, save time and get better insights on. The solution can:

• Translate your data smoothly into an actionable plan.
• Take the guesswork out of your social strategies.
• Help you understand what, when, and how often to post.

The chances are high that you need to also share your results with a team or your management. Such a tool would help you get a clear picture of what’s driving results from more than 100,000 brands across all major social media platforms.

Final thoughts. 

Are you ready to benchmark against your competition? Getting the data that matters and putting it into practice might look like a tough exercise, but it would bring your social media to the next level. And the more you practice it, the better business outcome there will be.

If you are looking for more inspiration on improving your results read our ebook on How to Measure your Social Media ROI.

Roza Tsvetkova

Marketing Content Specialist

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Social Media Competition Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide

Social media helps you connect with your customers, promote your brand, and showcase your services. But it’s also a highly competitive space for every brand vying to make their name on social media. How do you stand out? Here’s where social media competition analysis comes into play.

Social media competitor analysis is the gateway to unlocking the key strategies to uplift your social media. Not to mention, it involves more than just researching other brands’ social pages.

It’s about evaluating your competitors’ social media data to unveil valuable insights to boost your social media game.

So, how do you perform social media competitor analysis? In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through everything you need to learn about it.

Let’s dive in!

What is social media competitor analysis?

Social media competition is the process of evaluating, analyzing, and researching your brand’s competitors on social media to build better refined social media growth strategies.

Performing this technique helps you get ahead of your competitors by learning about their strengths and weaknesses to achieve what will align with your social media game plan.

Moreover, social media competition analysis allows you to dig up valuable metrics about your target audience, such as what makes them interested in your competitor’s social media business brand.

In the realm of social media competition analysis, utilizing evaluation form templates proves essential for systematically gathering and assessing data, empowering businesses to conduct a thorough and insightful evaluation of their competitors’ strategies and performance.

What makes competitor analysis in social media crucial?

Let’s go through what makes knowing about your competitors important for generating leads on Instagram and other social media platforms:

1. Build a diligent social media strategy

By understanding how your competitors are doing, you can pitch greater ideas out of their content and craft a more effective and powerful social media growth strategy that aligns with your marketing goals.

You can also compare your performance and progress with your competitors to adjust your content strategy accordingly.

2. Understand your target audience

A social media competitor analysis can provide a clear picture of your target audience, including their interests, demographics, and psychographics.

These deep insights will give a better understanding of who your ideal customers are, so you can create the content that they desire.

Knowing your customer personas will help your social media marketing game because you will understand:

• The pain points of the customers
• What type of content do they consume
• What time they are active on social media

3. Create relevant content

Performing a careful social media competitor analysis will help you master the psychology of your customers.

Knowing what content and brand image resonate with your ideal customers is essential for creating your brand’s digital creation.

In addition, you can audit your competitor’s social media pages by learning more about social media content creation by pinning down the color scheme, text styling, and other formats used in content creation.

Pro Tip; When conducting a detailed social media competition analysis, don’t overlook the power of social platforms like Pinterest. Utilize effective strategies, such as ‘ Pinterest Influencer Search ,’ to uncover valuable insights and stay ahead in the game.

How to do a social media competitor analysis

Now that we understand the importance of analyzing our competitors’ social media presence let’s explore how to implement it.

1. Find your social media competitors

Finding your social media competitors is the first step in analyzing their social presence. These are businesses or brands that offer similar services or products to your target audience.

To get started, it’s essential to identify the competitive keywords that land your social pages on search engines.

Identify your competitive keywords

These are the keywords or phrases that your target audience searches for search engines for the services you offer.

As an example, if you run a fast-food restaurant’s business page in Ohio, you’re likely to be focused on keywords such as “best fast-food restaurant in Ohio ” and “Ohio restaurants.” But if your restaurant caters to only meat lovers on specific working hours, you’re not directly competing with McDonald’s.

Having a clear understanding of your brand vision will help you develop a clear vision of who you are competing against.

Check the websites of all your competitors that appear with your keywords. Thoroughly go through the websites, and click on the social pages in the header or footer of the website.

Most of all, don’t forget to copy the links of your competitive analysis social pager in a spreadsheet.

Check who’s ranking for social searches for those keywords

Once you have noted down the brands that rank well on searches, check their social media pages. However, it’s a note that not always the websites that rank for your keywords on Google also rank well within social networks.

So, when conducting social media competitor analysis, you will need to check what brand tops in social media search results, too.

For instance, look for Facebook pages related to your services by searching for relevant keywords in the search box.

2. Gather platform-specific data

The next major step is gathering valuable data on your competitors’ social media platforms. You will need to focus on the platforms used by target customers, which are essential for your business to prosper on the platform.

To take a step ahead of everyone, you will need to refine your social media analysis by collecting data and listing it on a spreadsheet . However, to simplify things, leveraging a social media analytics tool like SocialBu will provide you with a complete, competitive picture of your competitors.

Nevertheless, let’s look at how your brand compares with competitor’s social media business pages.

Instagram competitive analysis

Instagram is the most popular visual platform for sharing and showcasing your brand image, services, and promotions.

That said, to gain insights into your competitor’s Instagram account. There are many factors that you will need to inspect:

• How optimized is their Instagram bio?
• Do they have a link in bio tool ? How are they using it to get traffic?
• What is their Instagram Theme like?
• Are they using story highlights? And how often do they update them?
• What hashtags are they using? Is there any brand-specific hashtag?

One secret hack to figure out your competitor’s Instagram presence is to search your competitor’s hashtags, such as #flogerscoffee, to see how many people are posting with the same hashtag; this will tell you about how popular the brand is on Instagram.

Facebook competitive analysis

Facebook is the place for everything! It’s where the social media revolution started, having a solid following on Facebook is crucial for your social media competition analysis.

Start doing a Facebook audit of your competitors by looking for the business basics:

• Number of Facebook likes and followers
• The visuals and graphics on posts. Are they similar to Instagram posts?
• Look at their hashtags. Are they using any specific hashtags to get reach?
• Do they have any specific tabs or business page features? For instance, some shop openers have a shop section enabled.
• Check their About section how they have set up their business page and Facebook presence.

Not only do you have to craft a visually attractive Facebook presence, but scheduling a Facebook post on the ever-growing social media platform will give you much time to work on your social media strategies.

X competitive analysis

X, previously called Twitter, is a widely used social media platform that businesses leverage to meet their objectives and engage their followers.

Twitter analysis will look similar to Facebook analysis. Here are some factors you should take into consideration when inspecting your competitor’s X analysis.

• Number of followers they have
• Do they have a blue tick on X?
• Review their bio. What are they highlighting? Is their bio similar to an Instagram bio?
• Are they active with Twitter trends?

To better understand competitors’ progress on X, level up with SocialBu’s Twitter analytics to analyze your competitor’s X metrics, posts, likes, reshare, and much more.

3. Keep an eye on your competitor’s social media strategy

To get a full view of how your social media competitors perform on social media, you will need to do a complete analysis of how your competitor does on each platform.

You must understand how your competitors use social platforms to achieve their objectives, communicate their goals, and sell their ideas.

Start evaluating your social strategy by laying the foundations on three main points:

How active are their pages?

What type of content do they post.

• What’s their brand persona on social media?

Knowing how frequently your social media competitors post on social media platforms will allow you to compare their posting frequency with yours so you can adjust your posting schedule.

It’s important to monitor how often other brands are posting. For example, if your competitor is posting multiple times a day and achieving excellent results, you may want to adjust your posting schedule accordingly.

What type of content does your competitor post to get high engagements? Are they posting more reels or regular posts? You can analyze their content format to understand what type of content performs well for them.

Moreover, you can also identify what content they are missing, and fill the gap with your content. A great example of social media strategy is providing solutions to the pain points of your audience.

What’s their brand persona?

A brand persona is the tone, voice, and style brands use on social media to convey their brand identity and relate with the audience on social media.

Voice denotes the attitude and perspective that a brand expresses on social media. Some brands opt to post from their viewpoint, while others entrust the responsibility to their social media managers.

4. Incorporate the latest data with social media monitoring

Surprisingly, most social media managers don’t keep up with the latest data for analyzing their competitors.

For mastering your social media competition analysis, you need to stay updated with the latest trends, developments and new strategies in social media and your competitors’ content.

Benchmark your social media metrics against your competitors

You will need to recompose your social media metrics against your competitor to keep it up to date. This will require tracking and measuring your social media results over time and analyzing your social media content strategy and metrics.

Laying down a well-grounded social media monitoring strategy will help you equip yourself with real-time data to help you plan for your social media strategy.

Competitive analysis with SocialBu analytics

SocialBu is a top-of-all- social media management and analytics tool that will take social media competition analysis to the next level. The effective social media tool will help you conduct a comprehensive and successful social media analysis.

Improve your social media performance by analyzing your posts based on real-time data and get tailor-made, intelligible reports in the form of highly detailed yet simple charts.

Finally, we have concluded this comprehensive guide to social media competition analysis. It’s all about identifying the strong and weak points of your competitors and gathering metrics and data from the competition to create your social media strategy.

By following the process explained in this guide, you can conduct a competitive and efficient social media analysis. Use SocialBu to get ahead of your competitors on social media and unleash your brand’s digital potential.

What is a social media competitive analysis?

A social media competitor analysis, also known as social media competition analysis, is an analysis of your social media competitors that offer similar services. It involves inspecting their social media strategy and finding out their strengths and weaknesses to sketch your social media strategy.

What is a comprehensive competitive analysis?

Competitor analysis is a strategy or methodology used for identifying competitors in your industry and researching their different marketing strategies.

How do you conduct a competitive analysis guide?

To conduct a competitor analysis guide, follow these simple steps:

• Define your goals
• Analyze your competitors and identify their strong and weak points
• Gather valuable information about your competitors
• Identify the gaps and opportunities in the market
• Strategize and implement your business plan accordingly

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How to Conduct a Social Media Competitor Analysis: 5 Quick Steps

Picture this : You’re in your weekly marketing meeting, the discussion about what to do for the next social media campaign crops up, then your boss asks the question “Well, what’s [ insert key competitor here ] up to at the moment?”.

And guess what? You know all the details. Data and all.

Oh yes, because you have clued yourself up with some thorough competitor analysis – namely, social media competitor analysis .

This doesn’t have to be a figment of your imagination either. With this post, you’ll find out everything you need to know about performing a competitive analysis for social media management or your next winning campaign.

Let’s roll on with the basics so future-you can start thanking today-you for the intel.

What is social media competitor analysis?

A social media competitor analysis is where you look into your competitors’ social media accounts – including individual campaigns and strategies as a whole – to assess their strengths and weaknesses, and compare them to your own.

For social media competitor analysis, this can include:

• Social listening
• Competitive benchmarking 
• Performance and engagement insights

Why is social competitor analysis important?

Any form of competitor analysis can (and should) be used to optimize your own marketing strategies and ultimately, outperform the competitors you analyzed.

A social media competitor analysis can help you understand your competitive landscape and what your competitors are up to on social… and what kind of thing you should be up to too.

After all, you can’t be competitive without competitive insights. 🤷

With thorough social media competitive analysis, you can:

• Track your competitors’ content, PR and social media strategies
• Understand your competitors’ brand reputation
• Know how customers and audiences engage with their content
• Follow partnerships or sponsorships from your competitors
• See how they use influencer marketing to boost engagement

… and ultimately, boost your brand’s digital presence via social media so you can reap the benefits of increased brand awareness, including more engagement, more traffic, and more conversions.

How to perform a social media competitive analysis

1) identify your social media competitors.

As a brand – big or small – you will already have some competitors on your radar. Whether they’re direct competitors with the same solution or they’re more indirect competitors, you have at least a vague idea of what you’re up against.

But who is your competitor on social media in particular? This will factor in not only brands with competing products and services that have social media accounts, but more specifically, the brands your target audience also follow and engage with. You know, the engagement you don’t want to share with your competition and want all for yourselves.

So, who else is your target audience following? Instead of partaking in some incredibly manual social media stalking of some of your current clients, you can look into who else your target audience is following using tools like:

• Facebook Insights Analytics
• Twitter Insights Analytics

With these tools, identify top pages and profiles that are relevant to your industry for your target audience and add them to your competitors list.

With Simliarweb Audience insights, you can see other industries, topics and even domains that users of particular websites are interested in – here, we use the example of lululemon.com.

Consider creating surveys, which you can configure around basic demographic and audience behavioral data, to gain even more personalized insights into your audience.

Now, how about uncovering these competitors’ social media strategies then?

2) Find the social media platforms they use

By taking the top 5 brands in your competitor list and seeing which of their social media platforms are the most active, you’ll get a good idea of where your target audience ‘hang out’.

This should refine – or at least focus – both your competitor analysis and your social media strategy on the platforms that matter most to your users and prospects.

Different industries will be more prominent on different social media platforms. You’ll see tech brands more often on X and LinkedIn, whereas ecommerce brands tend to ride the waves of Instagram and TikTok.

But hey, just because your competitors aren’t on a platform doesn’t mean you should rule it out completely – less competitors in your field, more visibility. You’ve just got to be creative with how you’ll reach the right people for your business; that might be partnerships, hashtags, video optimization, and content distribution.

Interested in how you could go about that? Listen to this episode of Similarweb’s In Search Podcast to hear how SEOs can make it in the world of TikTok:

3) Understand which platforms bring the most traffic

While your competitors might be active on different platforms, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re performing well on them.

Engagement on social media is all well and good, but ideally, you want that social media engagement to convert into website visits and loyal customers.

Using tools like Similarweb Social Overview, you can see how effective social media is as a marketing channel for your competitors, and how much traffic they gain from each platform.

You can even compare multiple brands social media performance at the same time:

As tech publishing brands, you can see that the social media platforms they get the most website traffic from are Reddit, Twitter and LinkedIn. 

4) Monitor the content and how often they post

You know what social media platforms your competitors use: ✅

You know how effective these social media platforms are for their business: ✅

And now, you want to know more about the type of content: ✅

By monitoring the content your competitors put out, as well as how often they put content out, you can benchmark your own social media activity.

What’s the ratio between videos, reels, photos, shared links or text in content shared? Are they sharing once a day or three times weekly?

This is where social media analytic tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite swoop in to lend you a helping hand.

Keeping an eye on competitors’ content and the engagement for these social media posts will not only give you insight into the social media strategy they’ve got going on, but also make sure you’re on top of any campaigns and influencer partnerships they’re working on.

5) Track audience engagement and interactions

Here’s something to remember: Just because they’re posting a lot, does not mean they are posting relevant content or hitting the right peoples’ newsfeeds.

And what happens when you aren’t posting relevant content to your followers? Low engagement. 👎

You want to make sure that you’re working with social media in the most effective and efficient way, and getting the most engagement you can.

Here are some fun facts on social media engagement for businesses like yours:

• Users spend an average of 2+ hours on social media, every day
• About a quarter of those people use social media for shopping
• In fact, 70% of UK millennials and 78% of Gen Zers buy directly from social

Seeing the benefits of these statistics comes down to the content you publish, and ensuring it’s being seen by the right people.

With social media competitor analysis, you can understand what’s working for your competitors and what’s not.

What kind of content is getting the most likes? What kind of content is getting the most shares? And… what kind of content converts best into website traffic and conversions?

Enter: Similarweb.

Let’s say a competitor of yours is using a social media campaign to promote a specific product or landing page. Track how effective this was using the Campaign filter in Popular Pages to give you insight into current campaign pushes for any company.

Here, we take stanley1913.com as an example because we all know someone who’s got a huge Stanley tumbler (it actually made a big appearance in top trending search terms recently):

Dive even deeper into the data with Segment Analysis. See where traffic saw an uptick (or a downturn) and whether this coincides with when the social media campaign started to judge how successful it was – and why it was so successful.

Take the strengths you find, avoid the weaknesses you find, and apply these learnings to optimize your own social media strategy. Easy.

Post-analyzing, get strategizing

Now you know how to do competitor analysis for social media, it’s time to start optimizing (or completely revamping) your social media strategy so you can steal your competitors’ followers and outperform them entirely.

Not only will you be getting more likes, but you’ll be watching your website metrics soar too. 🚀

Don’t go thinking it’s a one-time thing. Your competitive landscape is always changing and you want to make sure you’re always up to date by performing competitor analysis (of all types) on a regular basis.

If you’re keen to skip the manual processes – as well as the social media stalking – and like the sound of an all-in-one marketing platform to provide you with all the competitive data you need, Similarweb is calling out your name.

And fun fact: You can try the platform for free today.

Outperform your competitors on social media (and beyond)

Get the freshest, most accurate competitive data now.

What is competitor analysis for social media, and why is it important?

Competitor analysis for social media involves examining the social media strategies and performance of your competitors to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for your own brand. It’s crucial for understanding the landscape, discovering trends, and refining your own social media marketing efforts for better results.

How does Similarweb help with competitor analysis for social media?

Similarweb provides comprehensive data on your competitors’ top performing marketing channels, top performing social media platforms, and insights into the effectiveness of social media campaigns based on conversions into website traffic to key pages. It allows you to benchmark your performance against competitors and gain valuable insights to improve your social media strategy.

What social media metrics should I analyze when conducting competitor analysis?

When analyzing competitors’ social media performance, focus on metrics such as follower growth rate, engagement rate (likes, comments, shares), post frequency, content types, demographics of the audience, and referral traffic to their website from social media platforms.

How do I identify my main competitors for social media analysis?

Identify competitors by researching brands in your industry or niche that have a similar target audience and are active on social media platforms. Look for brands with a strong social media presence and high engagement levels to gain meaningful insights for your analysis.

How often should I conduct competitor analysis for social media?

It’s recommended to conduct competitor analysis on a regular basis, such as quarterly or biannually, to stay updated on evolving trends, strategies, and competitor actions in the dynamic landscape of social media marketing.

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How To Perform A Social Media Competitive Analysis

Home > Blog > How To Perform A Social Media Competitive Analysis

✍ Caroline Brisset

🕑 6 minute read

Social media is a crucial part of any business growth strategy — businesses and brands can dispel brand information, build brand popularity, sell products, and gather data about customers and competitors within a day’s time, to say the least. In this article we’ll focus on competitor insights through social media, the steps to pull insights through a competitive analysis, and ways to bolster your strategy from there. 

What is a Social Media Competitor Analysis?

A social media competitor analysis is the process of evaluating competitors on social media to find opportunities and build strategies. This tool helps identify competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to develop your own effective social media marketing strategy. Competitor analysis enables your business to learn information about your competitors’ target audience, as yours and your competitors’ audiences are most likely to overlap.

Benefits of Conducting a Social Media Competitive Analysis

Social media competitive analyses give brands insight into industry trends, audiences, and opportunities for improvement to stay ahead of the competition.

Gain insight into industry trends

Social media trends are key to building a strong social media strategy . With social media marketing analysis, your brand can identify niche opportunities that other competitors are taking advantage of. Your business can also gain insight into what social media marketing tactics work (and don’t work) for your competitors, such as new market trends and topics, what the audience already likes, and competitive keywords to help your brand rank.

Reach new audiences

Brands that take the time to learn from their competitors’ audience are able to gain insights to understand their own current and potential customers better. Consider the following questions to help you get to know these audiences and reach new ones.

• What are their interests?
• What social media platforms are they using?
• What type of content are they searching for?
• How do they consume content?
• When are they active on social media?
• What are they complaining about?
• What do they need solutions for?

Identify opportunities for improvement

Identifying areas of improvement and being open to change are key for brands seeking to grow in today’s climate. A SWOT analysis can help you identify what your business does best, as well as areas where you can improve.

• S trengths: what your business does well, such as qualities, resources, and assets.
• W eaknesses: what your business could improve on and what your competitors are better at.
• O pportunities: emerging needs for your products or services, underserved markets or areas.
• T hreats: new competitors, negative reviews, and brand reputation problems.

Using SWOT you can assess your business’s current state and what areas you need to improve. With opportunities for improvement in mind, you will be able to set realistic goals to build a successful marketing strategy.

Stay ahead of the competition

The SWOT analysis can also be applied to your competitors to identify their own strengths and weaknesses. Their weaknesses can become your strengths if you use the insights wisely. It’s also important to look at where competitors may be ahead, so you can make improvements to those areas.

Steps to Conducting a Social Media Competitive Analysis

Businesses can benefit greatly from conducting a social media competitive analysis. Here is our 8-step guide to reap the benefits of this social media tool.

1) Identify competitors

Businesses that offer similar products or services as your brand have to solve the same problems as you do. That’s why it is important to find out who your direct and indirect competitors are. A quick way to do this is to identify competitive keywords, the keywords your brand uses that most likely overlap with competitors. Google keywords ranking search, and competitive research tools, are great ways to identify them.

2) Analyze social media presence

Your competitor’s social media presence offers useful insights and data to compare their performance to your own. Social media metrics such as account reach, impressions, followers, engagement rates, share of voice, organic traffic to page, and competitor keywords will help you get an idea of where your competitors are at comparatively. 

3) Analyze social media content 

Channel activities are a great source of information regarding your competitors’ social media content to see how active they are on social media and how they reply to comments and create engagement. This analysis will help you understand where the gaps are in their content strategy and engagement in comparison to your own.

What types of content do they post?

Take a look at their social media accounts to see the kind of content they usually post such as promotional, product-related, or user-generated content to see what is and isn’t working for them. Content format, form, and type will guide you on what could be working for your own social media platforms.

4) Analyze their audience

Your competitors’ audience is probably similar to yours. Your social media competitor analysis should include taking a look at their audience to learn about their interests, likes, age, location, and gender, to name a few.

What’s their brand persona? 

Brand persona is key to understanding how your competitors present themselves to their customers on social media. Their brand voice, tone, and messaging point of view are all part of their brand persona. Brand persona analyses will give information on how they interact with customers online.

5) Identify their unique selling proposition

Businesses have their own strengths, which can be assets, resources, or simply things that they know how to do very well. These unique attributes are selling points that already work, and that you most likely will benefit from learning from.

6) Identify opportunities for improvement

Your competitors also have weaknesses. Take the time to see where they fall short on social media. Those gray areas are business opportunities for your brand to step in and implement better solutions.

7) Create an action plan

All the information and data you found while doing your competitor analysis will help in your own social media strategy. Creating an action plan will provide you with the outline and accountability for turning your insights into results.

Start by making a list of opportunities you want to implement from your analysis. Then put that list in priority order. Under each opportunity, list out specific action items needed to accomplish said goal, and assign each of those items to the proper team member with a proposed due date. As each opportunity is completed, you can check off and start monitoring or measuring performance. 

8) Monitor and adjust.

Social media is an ever-evolving place. Your business must keep progress in check and continually monitor competitors as the competition continues to evolve and improve. Your social media strategy should include monthly, quarterly, midyear, and annual check-ins to identify new growth opportunities and help you stay on top of your competitors.

What Tools Can Aid You to Perform Social Platforms Analysis?

There are a few tools that can help you conduct your social media competitive analysis and help you keep the process as smooth and efficient as possible.

Social media monitoring tools

Social media listening tools are technologies that help track mentions of your brand or competitors. These tools can also report metrics related to engagement, impressions, reach, clicks, views, user sentiment, conversations, online mentions, and more.

Social media analytics tools

Social media analytics tools can help your business create performance reports to figure out what is working and what is not. Those tools are used to monitor and assess while providing historical data. Analytics tools are a great way to gather and find meaning in data from social media to help with data analysis and inform business decisions.

Social media scheduling tools

Social media scheduling tools assist social media post scheduling across all different platforms and accounts. These tools aid with identifying the best time to post to get maximum reach while optimizing marketing efforts.

Discover your Competition With ICUC 

A social media competitive analysis enables brands to gain insight into new trends, reach new audiences, develop a strong brand identity, and stay ahead of the competition. Understanding your competitors, as well as your own strengths and weaknesses, is key to building an effective social media marketing strategy.

Need help starting your competitive analysis? Schedule a call with us here .

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How to Conduct a Social Media Competitive Analysis

• Post author: Daniel
• Reading time: 17 mins read
• Post last modified: June 27, 2021

Today, brands and businesses have realized that investing in social media is as important as non-virtual platforms.

Since the internet has made the world a much smaller place, owners use it as a brand-value building and awareness tool. All the brands aspiring for success need to get on this bandwagon.

Now, let us ask you: How can a brand ensure that it has the edge over other competitors in the local and international markets?

To have an up-to-date, effective social media strategy , you must conduct social media competitive analysis regularly.

But what is social media competitive analysis?

What are the components or steps of such a process?

What is its relevance/benefit vis a vis brand awareness, outreach, and competitive edge?

Let’s find out.

1. Competitive Social Media Analysis Guide

Competitive social media analysis is nothing but an analysis of your competitors’ social media presence and reach . It is a quest to identify the method(s) of outreach used by them, along with the positives and the drawbacks of such strategies.

Further, it involves comparisons between such inferences with your brand’s own social media marketing strategies.

Putting together a competitive social media analysis is key because it helps in the following:

• Identification of relevant competing brands on social media
• Their degree of presence on certain platforms
• Various platforms preferred by these brands for marketing
• Their methods of using such social media platforms
• Results of the strategies they employ
• As identified in the first part of the analysis, a brand’s social media marketing strategy is compared with its competitors.
• Noting the virtual social threats to a brand
• Finding flaws in brand strategies and
• Mending such loopholes

2. The Steps Of a Competitive Social Media Analysis

Given below are some useful procedures that one can use to conduct a fruitful competitive social media analysis. Following them, you can have the upper hand over its competition on different social media platforms.

In addition, it can help strengthen your virtual outreach measures by investing more in the right areas.

2.1 Create a List of Competitors

To create this list, you must first figure out the relevant competitive keywords. Keywords are crucial words for which every brand strives to rank within the top search engine result pages (SERPs).

The keywords in this list can vary depending upon the nature of the brand and the industry in which it belongs.

So how do you conduct keyword research? It’s easy.

• Create a list of competitive keywords based on your brand and business relevancy.
• Identify the top brands for these selected keywords on Google and other social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
• Identify identical brands that are liked and followed by your target audience.
• Choose 5-10 most relevant competitor brands.

Comprehensive knowledge of the keyword inventory is integral to identifying competitors in the virtual space.

Many analysts use keyword planners to create an informed list of the pertinent keywords and average searches per month, and targeted competition levels.

These keywords can help you notice exactly which businesses can be termed as competition. Automatically, this puts you in a better position as compared to your competitors.

2.2 Take a Look at Google SERPs

From a list containing 10-15 of the most relevant keywords, 5-10 chosen ones must warrant Google searches. Enter the online competition! First, some of the most popular brands will have Google advertisements to their names.

They are simply investing in Google ads to get their brand names at the forefront of the organic search results. This already puts them in a better position compared to other brands!

Along with Google SERPs , taking a look at this top-tier competition’s social media pages/websites is helpful. This way, an analyst can note the different media avenues through which successful brands have already created a promotional base for themselves.

For example, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram searches based on the 5-10 relevant keywords open a different world! The top search results demand a closer look. Posts created and/or shared by these brands, comments and feedback given by followers or customers, and even the likes on each of their posts help your brand analyst realize their popularity in the virtual realm.

More on keyword research

• Keyword Research Guide to Improve Your SEO
• Keyword Research Tools That Top Marketers Use in 2020
• How Long-Tail Keywords Could Drive Better Rankings

2.3 Brand Audience

Moreover, you need to sift through data on which businesses are followed by a brand’s audience. Identifying other brands preferred/considered by a particular brand’s audience lets the analyst create a well-informed list of competitors.

Tools like Twitter Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights are perfect for using to attempt in-depth customer research. Especially on Twitter, you should verify which other brands a particular business’s audience is interested in.

Keeping these important points in mind, you can gather enough information to create a mighty long list of potential competition.

The next step?

Cut and clip this list down to the five-six brands that can be considered as your closest competitors. Looking for other popular businesses, followed by a particular audience, can easily help you narrow down this list.

2.4 Data Accumulation

How are these competitor brands using social media platforms ?

The social networks of these brands and their websites must be considered before you can paint a clear picture of their popularity. Generally, their social media pages can be found on their websites (header and footer).

The trick is to go through the brands’ social media content to gather data instrumental to social media analysis.

This data must include:

• The various social media networks in which such businesses invest for promotion and brand outreach
• Their rate of posting
• Number of followers/audience
• The number of loyal customers
• Their rate of engagement
• Rate of hashtag use
• Frequently used hashtags

2.5 SWOT Analysis

In addition, the above data must be gathered concerning a brand’s own audience as well. The reason? A holistic SWOT analysis! As alternatives to manual search and collation of information, certain tools can expedite data collection.

SWOT analysis is by far the most analytical step of an efficient social media competitive analysis. Post data collection, you must analyze it to understand its position over your closest competitors. Thereafter, you can think about possible strategic improvements and the related potential barriers that can (and must) be overcome.

Enter the Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis. As evident, this step paves the way for an all-encompassing review of the positives and the drawbacks of a brand’s social media awareness strategy.

To start with, the strengths and weaknesses can be clustered as values determined by your brand’s internal factors. This includes analyzing the efficiency and effectiveness of an existing strategy, along with the possible areas of improvement.

On the other hand, opportunities and threats are determined by external reasons. Basically, these include the rules and regulations of the larger business milieu that every brand is a part of.

Since each industry has its own competitive business environment, you must consider before making an informed SWOT analysis and presenting the same to aboard.

2.6 Brands Strength and Weakness

To gauge a brand’s strength , you have to jot down the metrics for which its numbers are higher than its competitor businesses.

Your brand’s weakness can also be evaluated using metrics for which its numbers are higher than the competition. They can be reduced and overcome by rehashing social media marketing strategies that are found to be wanting.

Every social media network might bring its own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, a larger number of followers in one platform might prove secondary to exponential follower growth. On the other hand, audience engagement might not be efficient even though the number of brand followers is high on a particular page. In this regard, specificity is key!

2.7 Various Opportunities

After successfully realizing the strengths and admitting to the weaknesses, you must identify the various opportunities that must be utilized to the fullest. This includes avenues of improvement based on the data obtained or anticipated based on shifts in the social media networks.

For example, many people in the fashion niche have started acting as Instagram influencers who collaborate with various fashion and cosmetics brands for advertisement.

This way, upcoming fashion brands can help established influencers who have a large number of Instagram followers. In turn, working for the outreach of various brands also lets these influencers build their follower base by leaps and bounds.

2.8 Threats

Finally, the threats arising from external factors can vary. The best way to recognize threats is to look closely at the numbers: the abrupt and gradual changes related to promotion and growth. To take an example, a seemingly small business with a rapid follower growth rate can pose a bigger problem than a renowned brand with no scope of growth or expansion.

Considering these aspects of a brand’s social media strategy, you can provide exact and evidence-based information regarding possible stagnancy and suggestions for future growth.

2.9 Real-Time Data 

One-time social media competitive analysis hardly counts without regular data analysis and related modifications. The best option is to make such an analysis a part of your brand’s annual/bi-annual report(s). This clearly involves the addition, categorization, and analysis of information regularly.

To this end, personnel/software must be recruited/used as social media monitors as part of an overall monitoring strategy.

Moreover, they must be put into action regularly to obtain real-time data and accordingly review social media marketing strategies. In particular, such monitoring can be useful in identifying potential opportunities and threats before you can act upon them.

3. Relevant Tools for Analysis

Software developers have come to the aid of social media competitive analysts multiple times. Developers have created virtual tools that enable these analysts to obtain real-time intelligence from social network platforms.

Further, these tools can suggest potential measures to hasten the growth of social media popularity and audience engagement. The names and brief definitions of some popular competitor analysis tools are as follow.

3.1 Socialinsider [ Join SocialInsider ]

SocialInsider enables comparisons of a brand’s social media performance as compared to its immediate competitors. Its efficiency comes from the insights it provides about the social media strategies of competing businesses. The best and most engaging content posted by competitors can be identified, gathered, and combined.

For example, Socialinsider analyses the boosted advertisement put out by competitor brands. Boosted advertisements are paid for by brands, as they are considered the best promotional or information content that a brand has. In addition, it is easily customizable and provides sleek reports while erasing irrelevant or excess information.

Check below an analysis of the Gary Vaynerchuck Facebook page done using SocialInsider .

With SocialInsider, you may conduct competitive analysis on the following social media networks: Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. You may get 14 days free trial of SocialInsider that lets you add 5 accounts.

3.2 Facebook Analytics [Free] [ Join Facebook Analytics ]

Based on people-centric tracking principles, Facebook Analytics can enrich your existing data with aggregated and anonymized data on Facebook users, revealing valuable insights that will help your business grow. Facebook Analytics turns all of your goals into standard or custom conversion events.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant allows brands to keep tabs on their fiercest competitors. Using this tool, analysts can gather information such as page likes, post frequency, growth in followers, rate of engagement, etc.

A pathbreaking tool, this influencer marketing search engine takes brands to the most popular influencers who can advertise their products and services. It is the tool of choice for brands like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Brands can evaluate the reach and relevance of various influencers from within a vast pool and reach out to those they consider most suitable.

So they can opt for test promotional campaigns and track the results of the process in real-time. Thus, Klear streamlines a brand’s campaign management and helps build strong, lasting relationships with influencers .

3.4 BrandMentions [ Join BrandMentions ]

BrandMentions is another powerful tool for measuring your social media marketing impact. From brand monitoring, reputation management, business intelligence to competitor spying, the tool provides you with relevant information about the success of your brand awareness campaigns.

BrandMentions also provides real-time notifications; you get notified once your site gets a new backlink or is mentioned in places that matter across the web.

3.5 Keyhole [ Join Keyhole ]

This tool goes a step further: it offers brand monitoring data for various online forums, news platforms, and blog agencies. Also, it provides real-time analytics that brands can access anytime, anywhere. It lets brand managers know whenever their brands are mention or not, on top of event and campaign monitoring and influencer marketing.

One of the key features of Keyhole is that it streamlines the campaign monitoring process. This is possible by integrating collective data, by which Keyhole differentiates the high-performing campaigns from the poor ones. This tool rejects the latter while focusing on how to modify and further improve the former.

This list is far from exhaustive. There are loads of other social media analysis tools that brands can choose and buy according to their interests.

4. In closing

In summary, social media competitive analysis is a crucial practice that must regularly create, carefully, and effectively. A brand that aspires to improve its social media outreach and promotional growth must conduct multiple analyses.

It must also address the opportunities and issues regarding brand marketing and take the help of efficient analysis tools to put forth excellent campaigns.

Using the right set of tools, you can run your analysis quickly and spend more time focusing on your own efforts. How often do you gather data on your competitors?

Any tools that you consider essential to do social media competitive analysis?

Let us know in the comments below.

Further readings:

• Social Media Marketing Trends in 2020
• Why you should not ignore Social Media analytics
• Best Social Media Automation Tools
• How to Craft an Effective Social Media Strategy
• Social Media Tips for B2Bs

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