Social media competitive analysis is an effective way to get information on where you stand against your competition. Essentially, it is a type of analysis prepared by examining social media competitors’ performance. Although their data is public, compiling and analyzing it requires social API access and experience.
The most significant measure of the success or failure of your performance on social media is your position among your competitors. The idea is to target your competitors and set the right benchmark when evaluating your company’s social media presence.
Reasons to integrate competitive analysis tools into your workflow
1. Automate routine competitors’ metrics gathering: Although technically it is possible to collect competitors’ publicly available metrics and organize an enormous excel table with all likes, comments, followers growth, etc. In reality, it is much easier to automate this process via competitor analysis tools that scape important data points and organize competitors’ metrics into presentable reports.
2. Learn what works for your audience: When developing your content strategy for social media channels social media strategists often rely primarily on their account performance. Competitor analysis tools allow you to evaluate big industry players’ and competitors’ social media strategies and present this information in easy to digest way. You can quickly sort and spot competitors’ best-performing content and advertising campaigns.
3. Set accurate benchmarks: To set measurable goals realistic to your segment, you need first to understand what your competitors have achieved. Are they ahead of you or behind you? If it’s the former — study how they have achieved it.
4. Follow market trends: Make competitor analysis a routine task. A regular analysis can help you identify market trends, like seasonal sales, hashtags, or even social media challenges that either one of your competitors started or just participated in.
5. Reach competitors’ data: Competitor monitoring solutions usually provide a wide range of social media metrics such as deleted content metrics and graph historical data for you to measure trends easily.
The top competitor monitoring and analysis tools to analyze competitors in 2024
Numerous solutions exist on the market to analyze competitors. Due to the limitations of the social media APIs, the solutions listed below only gather publicly available information. Thus, the deepness of competitor analysis reports is different from your regular social media analytics reports.
The main difference between all competitor analysis solutions lies in the supported metrics, pricing, and UX/UI.
These are the top 5 social media competitive analysis tools you should try in 2024:
1. Sociality.io
Our Competitor Analysis module allows users to automatically gather competitors’ social media data and instantly prepare automated reports. Available for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube our reports Sociality.io allows us to monitor competitors’ historical data from one collaborative dashboard.
All competitor analysis reports are exportable in PPT, PDF, and Excel formats. Additionally, you can download each individual graph in multiple formats for your custom report. Also, users can integrate competitors’ metrics with business intelligence software via API.
Sociality.io unlimited reports include the following metrics. You can preview the report here:
- Total fans/followers/subscribers growth
- Number of pages posts
- Post types
- Number of total interactions with separate graphs for each interaction type (number of reactions, likes, replies, etc.)
- Engagement rates
- Post days
- Post hours
- Detailed performance metrics of published and deleted content
Plus, advanced filters allow users to quickly sort competitors’ content based on content type or engagement rates.
All reports can be automated and delivered right to your team’s inbox at the scheduled time and frequency to save time.
2. Socialbakers
Socialbakers is one of the world’s largest social media statistics portals offering in-depth analysis of social media. Socialbakers, which strengthens its infrastructure every day, has been working since 2009 to measure and analyze the social media work of companies and maximize the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns across all major social networks.
Available social media analytics tools of Socialbakers:
- Campaign Analytics
- Competitor Monitoring
- Customizable Reports
- Engagement Tracking
- Influencer Tracking
- Lead Attribution
- Multi-Channel Data Collection
- Post Scheduling
3. Sprout Social
One of the tools you can use to measure your social media accounts is Sprout Social. Use it to compare key performance metrics and see what type of content performs best. Sprout Social’s competitor reports can track fundamental metrics like audience growth, engagement, and post volume for each network. In particular, you can examine your followers in detail according to their demographic characteristics.
Available social media analytics tools of Sprout Social:
- Campaign Analytics
- Competitor Monitoring
- Customizable Reports
- Engagement Tracking
- Influencer Tracking
- Multi-Channel Data Collection
- Post Scheduling
4. Hootsuite
Covering the most effective social media tools, Hootsuite is one of the most effective tools for managing, analyzing, and listening to content. You can use Hootsuite to follow your competitors’ social media activity, look for specific keywords and hashtags, and see how their customers perceive them.
Available social media analytics tools of Hootsuite:
- Competitor monitoring
- Campaign analytics
- Customizable reports
- Post Scheduling
5. Brandwatch
With the Brandwatch Competitor Analysis tool, you can learn how your brand performs against your competitors. Gain and use your new insights to shape and improve your social media strategy. Measuring customer perceptions and sentiment instantly helps add context to your competitor analysis.
Available social media analytics tools of Brandwatch:
- Competitive analysis
- Reputation management
- Influencer tracking
- Trend tracking
- Audience segmentation
- Sentiment analysis
How to conduct competitive analysis research and get insights?
You have your competitors and their social media links with basic info separated. It’s time to do the analysis. We recommend you start with a content strategy analysis, which can make or break a social media strategy. Then move on to studying the engagement and the demographics.
Analyze social media content strategy
Take a closer look at your competitor’s content. Study their tone of voice and frequency of posting. Is it consistent? Also, take a look at their media content. Do they share videos, images, slides, and infographics? If yes, then how often? Do their visuals have a custom design?
As we can see, @hmhome shares all types of content consistently: images with shopping tags, videos, IGTV videos, and highlighted stories. All the visuals are customized with a single scheme of colors and filled with coziness.
Here is a guide on how to track and analyze competitors’ social media content strategy.
Analyze competitors’ Facebook and Instagram ads
Study competitors’ ads to understand what works for them, their experiments, and how often they spend money. If possible, also take a look at the promoted content.
Here is a guide on how to track competitors’ promoted Instagram posts.
Ads are a good indicator of how each competitor is presenting itself to new audiences. All major social media platforms present free, first-party tools for everyone to see the pages’ ads. Facebook (Meta) has its Ad Library, which you can also use to study Instagram Ads. Twitter offers the Ads Transparency Center. And LinkedIn has the tool integrated into its interface. You can see the Ads section on each company’s LinkedIn page, on the left sidebar
How do followers engage with the competitors’ page?
Check the number of likes and other reactions the posts are getting. On Facebook and LinkedIn, which let users react with different emojis, make sure to check which type of reactions they get the most.
Monitor social engagement strategy
Take the time to study the comments people leave under the posts. Are they primarily positive or negative? How do people interact with the brand on social media? How does the brand handle the negative comments (if it receives any)?
How do competitors position their brand on social?
Take a look at the about/bio section and note how the company positions itself. Which sector does it aim to target, and what is its mission statement?
As we can notice, @hmhome uses CTA (call to action) in its bio to drive more engagement and make the audience generate UGC (user-generated content). As we all know, UGC is a king today. Plus, using a clickable link in the bio is also a great way to drive traffic to your website.
Analyze competitors on different social media platforms
You may wonder why is it essential to approach competitors on various social media differently?
Every social media platform has its audience and in-platform tools. Since every social media network is different, users expect the content they want to see and share there. While Instagram is all about connecting through photo and video content, LinkedIn is designed to showcase users’ job experience and professional thoughts.
The content posted on each social media affects how well your account performs.
Not every brand/business has to be on every social media possible. Brands/businesses should present on platforms where they can reach and engage the right target audience. Sometimes it’s better to spend time and effort on one social media platform and use it to its fullest.
If you want to know the specifics of competitor analysis on each social media platform, we’ve got you covered. Below are the links to detailed guides about the process on each platform.
- Competitor analysis on Instagram
- Competitor analysis on Facebook
- Competitor analysis on LinkedIn
- Competitor analysis on Twitter
The wrap-up
There you have it. Now you are prepared to conduct practical, social media analysis and, most importantly, improve your own digital marketing game through the power of market knowledge. We hope this guide has been helpful.
