You see your competitors crushing it on social media with tons of comments and shares, while you’re spinning your wheels trying to get a few likes. What’s their secret sauce?
A social media competitor analysis can help you reverse engineer their recipe.
The truth is, your competitors might not make better content than you. They simply might be smarter about how they play the game. Analyzing your competitors can help you figure out exactly what they’re doing right — so you can do it, too.
This doesn’t mean copying their every move. Instead, in-depth competitive intelligence will help you uncover their playbook so you can outplay them.
Maybe they’re posting at 7 a.m. instead of 9 a.m. Or maybe they’re using trending sounds or making content about specific topics. These clues can be your breadcrumbs to the strategy that draws your audience in, like a candy-covered house in an otherwise bland forest.
Here’s how you can create your roadmap to stronger content and better engagement with a social media competitor analysis.
Contents:
What Is Social Media Competitor Analysis?
Why Is Social Media Competitor Analysis Important?
How to Identify Your Social Media Competitors
Key Metrics to Track in a Competitor Analysis
Best Tools for Social Media Competitor Analysis
Analyzing Competitors’ Content Strategies
Using Competitor Insights to Improve Your Social Media Performance
The Role of Al in Social Media Competitor Analysis
Conducting Your Social Media Competitor Analysis with Meltwater
What Is Social Media Competitor Analysis?
Doing a competitor analysis on social media involves looking at what your top competitors are doing on social media. An in-depth analysis includes:
- The content they post
- The channel(s) they’re using
- The days and times they’re posting
- Posting frequency
- Content format (e.g., photo, video, text-only content)
- Engagement rates (e.g., likes, shares, comments, views)
- Hashtags
- Who they’re tagging
- Brand or influencer partnerships
- The purpose of each post (e.g., does the post include a call-to-action and link?)
- How they interact with their audience
Brands can look at all of these things together to dissect and benchmark their competitors’ strategy on social media. This gives you an inside look at how they might be outperforming you, inspiring you to improve certain areas and boost your social media efforts.
TIP: Download our free Social Listening for Benchmarking Guide to easily gauge how to stack up against your competitors on social media, in the press, and more!
Why Is Social Media Competitor Analysis Important?
You could spend all day creating and posting content on social media and have nothing to show for it. Social media success requires more than being active; you need to know what your audience cares about and what they’re most likely to respond to.
That’s why a competitor analysis on social media can be so powerful. It’s an inside look at what others are doing and the results they’re getting.
Here’s why a competitor analysis for social media matters:
- See what’s working and what’s not. It’s easier to spot trends, high-performing content, and even mistakes to avoid.
- Get inspired. Find fresh ideas for posts, topics, and hashtags.
- Get a better understanding of your audience. Learn what they engage with so you’re not wasting time and money on subpar content.
It’s all about gaining the insight you need to run a more effective social media marketing strategy. You can learn a lot by looking at your competitors, even if it’s discovering what not to do.
How to Identify Your Social Media Competitors
Before you can analyze your competitors, you need to know who they are. They’re not always as obvious as you might think, either.
You probably know your biggest rivals, but some of your strongest social media competitors might be brands you haven’t noticed yet. Here are some ways to find them.
Search by keywords and hashtags
Search your social media channels for keywords or hashtags you might use in your own posts. See who else comes up for those same terms, then dig into their feed to see what they’re posting. The accounts that show up consistently for these terms likely share your audience.
See who your followers follow
Take a look at the brands your audience is already engaging with. If they have your target customer’s attention, they might be worth watching.
Find competitors using social media tools
Social media monitoring platforms like Meltwater can help you surface your social media competitors based on audience factors or similar content. You can also use free tools like Google Alerts to see who’s publishing content on keywords related to your business, then check out their social channels to learn more about their strategies.
Read industry round-ups or “best of” lists
Articles or blogs that highlight brands in your niche can help you find top performers. If they’re getting media attention, it’s a good idea to watch them.
Key Metrics to Track in a Competitor Analysis
Once you have a shortlist of social media competitors (aim for about 4-5 competitors to track), you can start benchmarking your performance. You’ll want to look at a few key metrics to compare:
- Audience size: Number of followers who have opted in to see the competitor’s content
- Engagements: Number of likes, shares, comments, and views per post
- Posting frequency: How often an account is posting (e.g., per day, per week) and times of day they post
- Content analysis: Types of content posted, hashtags used, post length, and messaging style
- Top-performing posts: Posts that get the most attention and the common denominators between them (e.g., videos, product-focused posts, links to blog articles)
- Social media growth: Number of new followers acquired (or lost) each day, week, month, or year
Keep in mind these metrics are constantly changing. Plan on doing a social media marketing competitor analysis on a regular basis to ensure you have the latest data.
Best Tools for Social Media Competitor Analysis
You can collect some of your social media competitor data manually, but this can be a time-consuming process. It’s easier to use social media tools that can aggregate this data from multiple platforms in real time.
Let’s look at a few of the best tools that will help you learn how to do a social media competitor analysis the right way.
Meltwater
Meltwater’s AI-driven intelligence suite combines social listening with audience intelligence to help you better understand social media conversations. The platform does the heavy lifting of finding your social media competitors.
From there, you can do in-depth analyses on their content, including:
- Calculating share of voice
- Understanding audience sentiment
- Finding trending topics
- Knowing when competitors go viral
Meltwater’s social listening platform helps you connect the dots between competitors’ content so you can see how they’re holding an edge (or not). Knowledge is power, and you can use these insights to tailor your strategy to reach more people and deliver impact.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social primarily functions as a social media management tool. It allows you to create, plan, publish, and report on content and campaigns across your social presence.
It can also help you learn what your audience is talking about, which can lead you to new competitors. It includes a social media competitor analysis template to help you get started.
Sprout's listening tools use AI to learn the context behind conversations happening on social media. You can set up multiple keywords to track, then get alerts whenever someone mentions those terms. See who’s driving conversations and how they’re discussing topics to help you inform your content strategy.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite also specializes in social media management, but it can also help you conduct a competitive analysis. You can set up “streams” for different social media channels to keep tabs on your competitors.
These streams will show you new content, when they’re posting, and how their audience engages.
Streams can also track industry-related keywords and hashtags. This can help you spot new competitors on social media and gauge how they’re performing.
Analyzing Competitors’ Content Strategies
Once you have a list of your top social media competitors, you can start comparing your benchmark data and content to see how you stack up.
Let’s review some key areas to pay attention to.
Identify high-performing content types
Look for common themes in your competitors’ content. For example, are they posting more videos or static content? What type of content is getting the most traction? What times of day are they posting, or does it vary?
Tracking content over time will give you the best idea of what your competitors are getting right and where they’re falling short.
Evaluate messaging, tone, and branding
As you explore competitor content, look at how their posts align with their messaging, tone of voice, and branding. You can use these examples to strengthen your own posts and ensure your audience remembers more than just your content.
Understand audience sentiment and engagement patterns
AI-powered tools like Meltwater don’t just show what your competitors are posting; they also analyze content performance. You can gauge how audiences feel about content beyond likes and shares and even detect patterns in sentiment and engagement to get the full picture of a post’s performance.
Using Competitor Insights to Improve Your Social Media Performance
The more you learn from others’ content wins and mistakes, the better you can adjust your own performance. But don’t just copy their approach; find ways to put your own spin on similar ideas while infusing your brand’s uniqueness.
As you continue collecting data on competitors, you can use your insights to:
- Reduce content waste by creating posts your audience cares about
- Find content gaps to gain an edge over competitors
- Focus on trending topics that won’t get lost in the noise
- Learn more about your audience’s preferences to produce more high-performing content
When you know what to say, when to say it, and how to say it, you’ll have a better chance of standing out in the right way.
TIP: For more strategies on tapping into trending topics and making your brand part of the cultural zeitgeist, check out our free Ultimate Guide to Trendjacking.
The Role of Al in Social Media Competitor Analysis
AI is streamlining how brands conduct competitor analysis on social media. AI’s ability to review large amounts of data in real time allows you to gain instant and ongoing insights without manually reviewing profiles and updating spreadsheets.
This always-on access helps you get ahead of conversations and be prepared to shift or adjust your posts.
Let’s put this in perspective with a social media competitor analysis example:
A software company uses Meltwater to benchmark a competitor’s social media ads against their own. They notice the competitor constantly runs testimonial-based ads with quotes from real users. Inspired, they launch their own user-generated testimonial campaign — and their click-through rate increases significantly.
You might pick up on a few key pieces of information just by looking at the competitor’s social media. For instance, you can see the engagement rates on ads. But AI surfaces hidden patterns and common denominators to see what makes these ads tick. In this case, it’s the fact that the ads were all testimonial-based and included quotes from real users.
Adding the AI element can help you do competitor analysis faster and with greater accuracy. With trustworthy results in hand, your human team can be prepared to create, track, and refine your social media campaigns with confidence.
Conducting Your Social Media Competitor Analysis with Meltwater
AI-driven social intelligence platforms like Meltwater enable you to scale all the moving parts of your social media strategy, including competitor analysis. Meltwater lets you monitor unlimited keywords across all of your social media channels, allowing you to be everywhere all at once.
With Meltwater's AI, brands can uncover patterns in their competitors’ content that removes much of the guesswork of what and when to post. There’s no need to manually review each profile for new content or track engagement metrics; Meltwater does it automatically and at scale so you can jump straight into action.
Learn how Meltwater can help your org conduct a fast, in-depth social media competitor analysis when you request a demo by filling out the form below.
