What comes to mind when you think about a successful social media marketing campaign? Posting regularly? Working with social media influencers? Creating high-quality content? The truth is, it’s all of these things.
But there’s one, sometimes-forgotten tactic that’s just as important as these other qualities: competitor monitoring.
As the pressure to outperform other businesses on social media platforms grows, competitor monitoring has become essential for successful marketing campaigns. Social media competitive analyses not only help you keep up with the competition but also reveal what works and doesn’t, saving you time and marketing resources.
The best part? You don’t even have to do it manually. With Sked Social’s competition monitoring feature, you can track competitors’ posts and engagements and gain the powerful insights you need to stay ahead with just a few clicks.
Why you can’t win on social media without competitive analysis
Social networks have evolved from simple communication channels into battlegrounds for attention, where you constantly have to go head-to-head with competitors.
So posting without knowing what your competitors are doing and what’s working (or not) for them is like trying to hit your target in the dark. You could make your shot, but it’s more likely you’ll miss it—and here’s why:
- Competitors may have discovered new trends that you completely miss out on.
- You may not know what’s considered “good” engagement and where you stand without comparing your social media performance against that of your peers.
- Your marketing strategy may be based more on internal guesswork than facts. A social media competitor analysis shows you what works, so you can replicate it in your own campaigns.
- There’s no way to identify the gaps your competitors leave—that are just waiting for you to take advantage of them.
When competitor monitoring changes the game
Social media is one of the most popular sources of competitor intel. If you play your cards right, it could help you:
- Spot competitors’ content gaps (and opportunities for your brand): It can show you what your shared audience wants that your peers aren’t doing, informing your next strategy. For example, if you find that competitors’ comments are filled with unanswered questions, you could create content that provides the answers.
- Benchmark engagement and growth rates: You may think your content is performing well just because you get hundreds of engagements or a couple of new followers every week. But if competitors are getting thousands of interactions and dozens of new followers, you may not actually be doing that well. Competitor monitoring gives you a realistic yardstick to base your campaign goals on.
- Pinpoint content formats and posting cadences that work: You can see the type of content or posting schedule that gets the most engagement, saving you from spending your marketing budget on tactics that are unlikely to work. This is more important than ever, as marketing teams are still grappling with budget cuts.
- Identify influencer marketing strategies that convert: Competitor monitoring reveals the types of influencers peers use and their impact on engagement numbers—information that can help you optimize your own campaigns.
Meet Sked Social’s competition monitoring tool
With Sked Social’s competition monitoring tool, you don’t need to manually track what competitors are doing and what’s working. Sked does it for you and provides AI-powered analytics and details on:
- Benchmarks: See your competitors’ follower growth, type of content (images, carousels, or reels), posting frequency, and where your brand stands in comparison. You can add up to 20 Instagram competitor profiles per brand.
- Engagement metrics: Track competitors’ daily posts likes and use the comparison matrix to see how your engagement rate compares to your peers’.
- Posts: Automatically pull competitor posts from a specific timeframe and filter them by engagement, likes, comments, or recency, based on what you want to see.
We recommend tracking indirect competitors that share the same target audience as your brand, alongside direct ones. In other words, if you run an e-commerce store, you could track non-competitor e-commerce brands with high engagement numbers for insights into their content formats and posting habits.
It’s also smart to focus on the metrics that are most relevant to your business. For example, if you want to expand your reach to global audiences, focus on a metric like follower count and supplement your insights with data from Sked’s social listening tool to see who is engaging with your content and where they are located.
On the other hand, if you’re a local brand, number of followers may be less important than metrics like comments and post likes, since you want those online interactions to turn into real-life engagements.
Want to see our competitor analysis tool in action? Book a demo today!
Uncover opportunities to get a leg up on your competitors
Sked’s competitive analysis tool provides detailed competitor insights and side-by-side comparison views to help you spot content gaps and identify trends. It pulls content and data directly from competitors’ feeds, showing you everything from the type of content they’re posting to whether they’re engaging in social media trends and how it’s working for them.
Say one of your competitors regularly engages in microtrends on Instagram. Our platform will show you exactly which trends they do and break down their virality to help you understand if this is something that resonates with your audience. This way, you’ll know whether to incorporate them into your content strategy to stay competitive.
Our tool also goes further to analyze audiences, providing valuable insights into their demographics. Comparing demographic info against the performance of different types of content can show you what speaks to different customers, informing what you post across social media and other marketing channels.
Collaborate effortlessly, save time and spend less
Why settle for a lackluster social media management tool when you could be using Sked Social? With unlimited collaborator access, streamlined approvals and advanced auto-post technology that lets you schedule to all major platforms, Sked Social offers everything you need.
Get Started for FREEFind out what audiences really think about your brand
Competitive insights are just one part of effective social media marketing. You also need to find out how the people you’re trying to reach actually feel about your brand.
Enter Sked’s social listening and reputation management features.
These tools analyze comments, keywords, hashtags, brand mentions, and campaigns across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Threads to show you exactly what your audience is already saying about you.
But it doesn’t stop there. Sked bridges the gap between basic analytics tools and enterprise-level solutions by following up social listening analysis with valuable audience, trend, and competitor insights—all in one user-friendly, affordable platform.
Plus, you can integrate social listening metrics into custom reports to streamline analyses and make it easier to keep stakeholders in the loop.
Optimize your content strategy with smarter insights
Sked doesn’t just provide competitor performance data and leave you to analyze it on your own. Our AI tools create summaries that make it easier for your team (and your stakeholders) to make sense of all the data and actually use it to optimize your content and overall social media strategy.
With Sked, you get actionable optimization recommendations based on performance data and audience insights. Learn the best times to post on every social media channel, see your ideal high-engagement hashtags, and even get caption recommendations that align with both your target audience and your brand voice.
Turn your social media analytics into a competitive advantage
Competition monitoring highlights where you stand and shows you what works (and doesn’t), based on your competitors’ activities. It can be a huge resource saver (no need to A/B test every single content format, influencer partnership, or posting cadence) and reveal competitor gaps and opportunities to take advantage of.
Sked can help you track up to 20 of your top competitors and provide AI-powered reports on what works, saving you the hassle of manual competition monitoring. With us, you also get access to capabilities beyond competition monitoring, like reputation management, social listening, sentiment analysis, and custom reporting, all in one platform.
And did we mention it’s much more affordable than enterprise-level tools, with benchmarking charts and analytics that are just as comprehensive and easy to understand?
If you’re looking to gain a competitive edge on social, try Sked’s all-in-one platform today!
