Growing your business on social media can be overwhelming with tons of analysis for each account and endless numbers that seem okay but not good enough. Competitor analysis can help you get the job done. While it may seem like an impossible job to understand every single aspect of how social media algorithms change and how to use that for a good account, do not worry. Because with a simple and comprehensive guide, you’ll get the hang of social media marketing strategy and all about deep learning that goes hand in hand with it!
Brief Introduction to Social Media
Social media has surely come a long way in terms of what it offers to its users. First started as various platforms where people share personal pictures, ideas, and the general course of their life online, now social media can affect millions of people through ads and influence the way people behave. This provides business owners limitless possibilities with more than 4 billion potential customers they can reach with the tip of their fingers.
Before we cover the 15 steps on competitor analysis on social media, it’s best to understand what social media is and how you can use it to boost your business just like the top tier in your market.
– How exactly does social media work?
Social media platforms use algorithms to convey what’s popular and what’s not. By doing so, they aim to provide their users with a pleasant time and attract them more. The same rule applies to influencers, small or big businesses that use social media to promote themselves and celebrities. Doing what algorithms like and repeating it ultimately carries you to the top. That’s why prioritizing social media management and taking time to learn more about deep learning is essential in your social media plan.
– What is social media analytics?
An inseparable part of a growing business process is to know who your target audience and potential demographics are. Through social media analytics, you can gather data on customer experience and plan your marketing strategies accordingly.
– How can you boost your business with social media?
With its ever-growing user numbers, social media now holds a lot more power for advertisements for business owners than any other communication tool. And each day, the investments are getting bigger. According to the Internet Advertising Revenue Report by IAB, In comparison with 2019, the revenue spent on digital advertising grew by 12.2% reaching 41.5 billion in 2020. Using social media brings big profits to businesses and connects you to new potential customers in a more personal way. Moreover, you can pinpoint the crucial info such as the best time to post on social media and the trends in your line of business.
Understanding and Conducting a Successful Social Media Management
Many aspects of social media management showed to be a valuable source for businesses. These include social listening, customer reviews, and experience, potential customers you can attract, and possible business partners (influencers, streamers, internet personalities, etc.) Once you gather the data and a customized marketing way, you’ll get the business results you want for your company or brand. A correctly conducted social media management shows the key points that are necessary for your business like when is the best time to post on social media to interact with your followers effectively.
AI-based tools are one of the most resourceful options when it comes to detecting social media marketing strategies since they use deep learning and are able to conduct the process from many different aspects.
How to do a Competitive Analysis on Social Media?
Now that you know why it is important to include social media among your marketing strategies, check out the 15 steps about competitor analysis on social media below gathered for you to provide simple and achievable ways to business growth.
Step 1: Finding out your top competitors in the market
The very first step in a competitor analysis is to find out the other players in your field. This information leads you to the average requirements that you need to step up your game in social media management. Gathering info on your top competitors provides you with a valuable template for what to do and what not to do at the same time.
Step 2: Analyzing their KPIs
After determining who you’re analyzing, it’s time to decide what aspect of their data you need to focus on. While the more data you analyze the better, paying attention to key performance indicators is a solid start. They directly show how many visitors your competitors get weekly or monthly along with data on their interactions and the feedback. This will give you an idea about your intended goals.
Step 3: Find out which social media platform they’re using
Although social media is a vast ocean filled with opportunities in terms of reaching new demographics for customers, finding which direction you should prioritize is an important step. In your line of business, which social media platforms your competitors are using brings out this information. If your target customers are young people, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok would be better options than others. If you appeal to an older age range, Facebook can be a more successful platform.
Step 4: Read up on their social media interactions
While conducting a competitor analysis, acquiring information about how your competitors interact with their customers gives you a solid idea for your own marketing planning. Creating an effective social media marketing strategy includes a detailed way how to connect with your followers, deciding the best time to post on social media, which content to increase, and more!
Step 5: Identify competitors’ content themes
Social media takes shape with billions of content full of different purposes. In order to find your content themes, looking at what your top competitors are sharing is a good start. If you’re not getting enough feedback from your followers (negative or positive) it’s high time to change your content with more attractive and interesting ones. Instead of trying random subjects, take your competitor analysis as a guide and boost your follower interactions on social media risk-free.
Step 6: Compare your content and the interaction rates
Through competitor analysis on social media, you can actually see where you need to work on more since the data is backed with numbers and not just predictions and personal opinions. At this point, interaction rates are trustworthy indicators of how well you’re doing online. Set both your competitors and your interaction rates side by side and do the math! Reroute when necessary and experience better customer interactions.
Step 7: Specify the goals through the competitor analysis
Once you know what to do and which parts of your social media management you should change, you’re ready to identify your goals clearly. What your competitors do and how well their outcome can serve your purposes as well. First, think about what you need urgently in your social media strategies, and use the analysis as a guidebook. You can take their data and make it suitable for your business or brand.
Step 8: Determine the negative contents you should avoid
Whether it’s a cultural issue or a risky subject, you can gain followers and therefore potential customers by not sharing certain content. As much as what you share on your social media accounts, what you choose not to share also counts. Followers use social media first and foremost to feel better and are informed at the same time. Knowing what they expect from you tells you what kind of content they like to see on your social media. And if you keep sharing unrelated or unwanted content, the algorithm can detect the fall of interactions you’re getting and it would be harder to get back.
Step 9: Learn when people are the most active on social media
Posting when most of your followers and target groups are offline is like showing up to a party dressed in your best clothes with a cake on your hands. You waste both time and the effort you put into your content. However, there is a solution to this: observing your competitors’ content sharing schedules and how many interactions they’re getting from their followers. If it works for them, it will work for you too since the target audience you’re aiming at is the same.
Step 10: Create a roadmap for future contents
It’s good to have a stable content plan. But with competitor analysis, you can do much more than that! Through the content your top-tier competitors share on their social media platforms, you can set a course for your future content that will keep your interactions with followers high and attract more people in the meantime.
Step 11: Determine their most successful interactions and target audience
Which age group or demographic are they communicating with the most? And how is the customer experience they get? Knowing this provides you with the information you need to work on. If you’ve been trying to make a hit with the wrong crowd, you waste your resources in vain. But, once you determine the target audience you can have the most success from, you can easily steer the social media wheel toward them and get fascinating business results.
Step 12: Learn from their mistakes
Another great thing about conducting a competitor analysis on social media is that you can actually see if a marketing strategy works on customers without risking anything on your own. While analyzing your competitors’ content and how well it was received by the customers, you can learn a lot about what not to do with your social media planning.
Step 13: Benchmark the outcomes and reroute if necessary
Conducting a competitor analysis on social media doesn’t necessarily mean you will apply everything to your own social media management. It simply means that you get the average requirements of your line of business and compare it to how well you’re doing online.
Benchmarking is an inseparable part of this process. From engagement rates to weekly or monthly new follower numbers, you can see where you stand in the competition and change your method and contents accordingly.
Step 14: Use the right tools to conduct a comprehensive analysis
Since social media became a fast and effective force in marketing and advertising, many tools have emerged to help companies to keep track of the market and help them conduct extensive analyses. As new analysis tools come up, you might get overwhelmed. We point out what to look for in an analysis tool to get what you need.
1. Multi-Platform Friendly
To create a comprehensive social media marketing strategy that works, you need a thorough analysis of many social media platforms.
2. Easy to Use Interface
Without complicated graphics and cumbersome visuals, conducting a competitor analysis on social media is actually quite easy and effective.
3. Cost-Effective
As a business owner, of course, you look for both affordable and high-quality social assistants. A working analysis tool won’t help you progress but paying a fortune can be a problem. Looking for these two features while choosing an analysis tool is going to get you where you want to be.
4. Useful Data Resources
To create an applicable route in your social media strategies, the data resources it uses should be related to what you’re looking for. That’s why it’s important where the tools collect the data.
5. Speed Social media means speed. How fast you are to interact with your followers and answer their questions matters.
Step 15: Bring all the missing pieces to grow your business
Now everything is in place, it’s time to apply the last step: bringing all the data and your intentions together. From the best time to post on social media accounts to what to post, you now know how to attract your target audience. All you need to do is to keep doing what is working and conducting competitor analysis systematically.
Socialays to Monitor Your Social Media Accounts: Non-Stop and All at the Same Time
Who wouldn’t want a 7/24 AI-based social media assistant that constantly manages your comments and is able to auto-hide ads, spam, and comments that include profanity? Socialays provides smooth social media management to its users with 7 special features at an affordable price. From Instant AI Reactions to Sentiment Analysis, Socialays-social media assistant keeps you updated with real-time notifications, enabling you to weed out the negative comments instantly.
How to Combine the Data and Shopping Behavior?
Social media analysis can help you reach new customers when combined with human connections.
– Connecting the dots with social media marketing strategy
Although it may seem complicated and multi-layered, social media actually consists of what you put into it. Since it’s a result of common effort, bringing the numbers and data together is possible with understanding humans. Your customers are ultimately affected by their emotions and make decisions through them. If you connect the dots and create a customized social media marketing strategy, you’ll definitely reach your goals.
– Keeping all business accounts related
When you’re updating your social media accounts according to social media analysis, make sure to update all business accounts. This helps you get the message of improvement across every possible platform. Your target customers may come from different backgrounds and therefore their preferences may vary in terms of interaction. Some prefer Instagram to follow you while some choose Facebook to get your latest news. Keeping track of all business accounts and making the necessary adjustments make the world of difference.
How to Improve Your Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, at its core, means that you reach out to people aka your potential customers through a screen instead of talking and earning what they prefer in person. While you can assess their preferences and inclinations through online data, the same process goes for them. They get to know your brand or company through posts, hashtags, mentions, and collaborations you make with internet influencers.
That’s why creating a sincere and unique story for your brand goes beyond any marketing strategy you can use. However, you can always get help from data analysis to know your strengths and weaknesses. Combining deep learning and an original idea can help you come off with flying colors!
5 Ways to Know You Conducted a Successful Social Media Analysis
After you conduct a competitor analysis on social media, set goals using the data you got from the analysis. Apply these goals to your business. Did it work? Social media analysis works wonders! There are a few ways to know whether your efforts give the intended results, here are 5 of them!
– Climbing Revenue
To know if a competitor analysis on social media is successful is, first, to look at the sales numbers. If your company/brand is gaining, you can keep doing what you learn through the analysis.
– Recovering Customer Reviews
With more people joining online communities, customer reviews hold a special value both for the company and potential customers. As many people read up on other people’s experiences before they purchase a product or service. That’s why increasing positive reviews from customers are a great addition to your marketing plans.
– Increased Interaction Rates
For powerful social media influence on every platform, connecting with your followers regularly is a must. If they know that you are going to post every day, then they will visit your page/ account. With a detailed social media plan, your increasing interaction rates will be noticed!
– The Number of Followers and Mentions
The simplest way to be more visible on social media is to increase your number of followers. Also, follow those who mention you to start building your network connections. When these two parameters get bigger, you’ll know that what you’re doing is working.
-Improving KPIs
Running a business requires constant review of your current projects and how successful they are on social media. By doing this, you can keep track of them and leave no room for unwanted surprises. Measuring Key Performance Indicators is another way of being sure that you’ve conducted a successful social media analysis.
In Closing
Benchmarking through competitor analysis is a great way to learn how your company/brand is doing in the current market conditions. With a social media marketing strategy plan, you can lay out realistic future goals for your line of business from today. The best and fastest way to do it is to conduct a competitor analysis on social media with analysis tools. These tools use data from the social media accounts of competitors and show how to improve your social media management.
Analysis tools that use deep learning to gather final data are one the useful methods to help you reach your goal as they take every variable to give you the clearest path to growing a social media business. Through a comprehensive social media analysis using the 15 steps mentioned, you can reach more customers and new customer demographics.
Moreover, with an analysis of successful competitors’ accounts, you can write good content and save time as well. See social media as a whole will give you a clear idea of what you can achieve with it. And for business owners, whether your company is brand new or one of the old ones in the market, competitor analysis on social media is impossible to separate in a successful business plan.
