8 Ways to Use Competitor Data to Improve Your Social Media Strategy
How can you use competitor insight to improve your social media strategy?
To help you improve your social media strategy using competitor insight, we asked content marketing professionals and social media managers this question for their best tips. From benchmarking against competitors to determining your best posting times from competitor insights, there are several ways to leverage insights you glean from competitor data to effectively improve your social media strategy.
8 Ways to Use Competitor Data to Improve Your Social Media Strategy
Tip 1
Benchmark Against Competitors To Build A Better Strategy
Rob Lambert, Flowers Across Australia
Benchmarking your engagement and growth rates against your competitors can help you understand if your current social media strategy is going to put you streaks ahead, or way behind. It’s worth looking at metrics such as how many times a day or week your competitors are posting and which formats they’re posting in, be it video, reels, static content or otherwise. If you are posting more frequently than your competitors but they still have higher engagement and better growth, it could mean your content is missing the mark with your audience.
Look through their follower growth or most popular posts to see follower spikes, then seek out the patterns, are they running competitions or giveaways on those days, or did they engage an influencer perhaps? Benchmarking acts as a good sanity check for how your social media strategy is going, you want to be at least as good as your competitors, otherwise, they’ll overtake you.
Whenever we post on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, the keywords we use greatly influence how much organic reach our post will generate. To optimize this reach, take note of what keywords your competitors are using, which you can use to your advantage. You only need to ensure that their keywords are relevant to your social content. Split testing with different keywords of your competitors will help as you’ll be able to track impressions. Lastly, keep using the best-performing keywords taken from your competitors.
Using competitor insight can help you improve your social media strategy in a number of ways. First, it can give you an idea of the types of content your competitors are creating, and what topics they are using to drive engagement. Second, it can help you create content that takes advantage of these popular topics and ensures that your content is better than your competitors’.
Finally, it can help you find new angles and take a fresh look at old topics to make sure you’re always putting your best foot forward on social media.
Influencer Marketing has more than doubled in the past three years, and influencers can allow your brand to create unique interactions that aren’t possible in a traditional marketing campaign. Learning more about how your competition approaches influencer marketing is essential if you want to get more out of this strategy for your own business.
Are your competitors working with micro-influencers or huge names? What do you see most in a typical influencer marketing post, and how can you apply that to your brand? You can’t afford to fall behind the latest developments, so keep an eye on trends from your competition. Using your influencer correctly will help you put forward a unique impression that enhances your brand image.
Tip 5
Use Insights From Competitors’ Comments Section To Shape Your Social Strategy
Fernando Lopez, Circuit
Aggregating customer attitudes through a sentiment analysis can help you quickly create a competitor’s brand perception on social media. Social listening helps you dig into qualitative competitor data – the good, the bad, and the ugly of the comments section is telling, especially during brand crises. These insights can help you shape your brand’s approach to social media to deliver where the competition is dropping the ball and differentiate where they’re performing well.
Tip 6
Strategize How To Differentiate Your Brand Through Competitor Analysis
Jim Campbell, Epic Carribean
Conducting competitor analysis gives you a guide on how to differentiate your brand from your competitors when it comes to tone, messaging, and branding. You want to make sure you stand out. You want to stay ahead of the curb and not look like a copycat.
Competitor insights help inform in filling the gaps in your own social media strategy too. By learning what type of content works for your competitor and what doesn’t, you strategize your content better in order to guarantee a better engagement rate.
Tip 7
Use Social Listening To Know What Customers Like About Your Competitors
Jenna Nye, On the Strip
One of the advantages of social listening is that it can give you insights on what your target audience likes or dislikes about your competitors and how your product/service stacks up against the competition. By taking these insights and customer feedback, you’ll be able to improve your product/service, work on missing advantages and fix any drawbacks as well as understand consumer behavior and what you need to improve in your product development, marketing strategy or customer experience.
One way social media competitive analysis can improve your own strategy is by indicating best posting times. If you’re analyzing a competitor’s social platforms, it’s likely that the two of you have similar customers. Using data to determine when your competitor’s followers are most active can then be applied to your own accounts. This can increase your social media engagement and potentially draw in new followers.
Start Using Competitor Data to Improve Your Social Media Strategy
Now that you know what the experts think, it’s your turn. Drop a comment below about your favorite way to improve your social media strategy through competitor data.
