How To Analyze Your Competitors Using Social Data

If your business is taking social media seriously, you will have noticed that social media is gradually getting harder to succeed at.  This is a natural progression of the channel, and the changes made by the platforms are largely to be expected.  Take Facebook for instance.  They have little choice but to reduce NewsFeed reach algorithmically for certain types of posts as there is only limited space, and the volume of content being produced by users and pages is constantly growing.

With this in mind, the need to get ahead of your competitors and leverage every impression your content receives is key.  To do this, we recommend analyzing your competitors’ efforts and comparing key performance metrics to your own.  By understanding their performance in detail, you can optimize your plans for success.

The first step is to decide who you’re classing as your competitors – this may not be as obvious as you think.  With social media platforms, your competitors should be classed as any of the following (with the more you can track the better):

• Your direct, traditional competitors
• Those competing for the attention of a similar audience to you, even if in a different sector
• Businesses with a similar content strategy, albeit for a different audience