Social media marketing isn’t about taking shots in the dark. Here’s how (and why) to monitor what competitors are doing to drive results.
These days, simply creating a social media presence isn’t enough. When competing for the same target audience’s attention, you have to continuously come up with ways to stay on top. And, the only way to do this is to keep up with what competitors are doing and track whether it’s working in real time.
Fortunately, your social media marketing team doesn’t need to camp out on competitors’ profiles to monitor them. Not when competitor monitoring and analytics tools like Sked Social are at your fingertips.
These tools provide the insights you need to enhance your competitive advantage, saving your team from the hassle of manual competitor tracking.
Why you need a competitor monitoring and analytics tool
Keeping up with competitors on social media can be tedious and time-consuming. But it doesn’t have to be.
Competitor analysis tools can help you collect and analyze competitor data more efficiently, showing you how you stack up against them. With the right tools, you spend less time gathering data and more time actually putting it to work.
Sked Social is a leading solution for competitor monitoring. With its competition monitoring feature, you can track up to 20 direct competitors and get reports on their content, posting habits, audiences, and engagement levels.
You can also take advantage of our reputation management feature to run a sentiment analysis of social media conversations. This will show you whether your target audience feels positively or negatively about your competitors—and your brand, as well.
Audit your competitors to establish a baseline
Data crunching and analysis aren’t the most glamorous part of social media marketing, but they’re important for competitive insights.
To effectively track competitors on social media, start with a thorough social media audit. This involves collecting data about your competitors and analyzing their performance to determine what works and doesn’t.
This way, you can borrow what resonates with your target audience and avoid focusing resources on what doesn’t, learning from your competitors’ mistakes.
Sked Social’s competition monitoring can help with this, too. It provides data on competitors’ engagements (likes and comments) as well as their posting habits and audience growth over time, giving you an all-around view of their action plans and results.
Perform a SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is a strategic move that involves assessing your competitors’ Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (and your own) to determine what to focus on in your social media marketing strategy.
Take the data gathered from your audit and organize it based on its impact on your social media performance and that of your competitors. For example:
- Your competitor has a strong brand voice on social media. This is a strength.
- They don’t post consistently on Instagram. This is a weakness. This could also be viewed as an opportunity for your own SWOT analysis.
- Their newly launched YouTube channel is hitting the mark with their audience. This is an opportunity for growth for them and could be a threat to you.
- Customers are complaining about the brand a lot. This is a threat for them and potentially an opportunity for you.
Keep an eye on your competitors’ social media accounts
With social media users averaging 6.83 platforms per month, manually tracking the competition can be a challenge. Not to mention, it’s not feasible for modern social media marketers, especially those managing accounts for multiple businesses, enterprises, and multi-location businesses.
That’s why many turn to social media competitor analysis tools like Sked Social. Sked makes it easy to keep up with competitors by monitoring what they’re posting, how they’re posting, and how audiences are reacting to it. It can also create AI-powered personalized reports to streamline competitor assessments.
Monitor their influencer marketing efforts
Social media marketing and influencer marketing go hand in hand. So, it’s likely that your competitors are already working with influencers.
Monitor their activities to see if their efforts are paying off before you incorporate influencer marketing into your social media strategy. Some of the specifics to pay attention to when monitoring these efforts include:
- The types of influencers they work with: Do they partner with nano, micro, macro, or mega influencers?
- Their content types: Do they create dedicated content focused solely on your competitors’ products or incorporate promotions within regular content?
- Their engagement rates: Do the influencers receive questions, likes, or comments about the products they endorse? Does traffic flow from their pages to those of competitors?
When you answer these questions, you can make well-informed decisions on which kinds of partnerships to pursue from the beginning.
Benchmark against where your competition is winning
Start by taking notes on the types of content competitors share. Do they share more photos, graphics, or videos? What are their main themes or topics?
Once you have an idea of competitors’ content types, assess how each one is performing. While you won’t have access to their internal data, you can evaluate publicly available engagement information, like shares, comments, and likes, to determine whether their content types are effective.
Also, compare their posting habits, hashtags, and use of organic versus paid social media against your own strategies to identify areas for improvement. For example, if higher-performing competitors post multiple times a week on Instagram and you do so once, you’ll know to increase your posting frequency.
Sked simplifies competitor benchmarking by automating report generation (for both your brand’s and competitors’ social media activities) and using AI to summarize key insights. This eliminates the need for manual assessments, allowing you to focus more on strategy development and implementation.
Let insights from social listening drive your content strategy
What better way to learn about your competitors’ brand reputation than directly from the competitor’s audience?
Social listening is the practice of tracking mentions and conversations related to a brand on social media. It provides insights into brand sentiments and new opportunities, which can help you refine your marketing strategy.
Say you find that a competitor with a lower number of followers than your brand receives more positive mentions, it’s safe to assume that their content may be resonating better with your audience. In a case like this, you can adjust your content strategy to incorporate more of what your target audience likes.
Sked Social’s social listening tool makes it easy to identify what to replicate or ignore by breaking down reports into the following three major parts:
- Analysis: Provides a broad, AI-powered overview of how your brand stacks up against 20 top competitors in your niche.
- Engagement: Compares your brand’s and competitors’ standard engagement metrics, like followers per day and comments, and shows you where you stand in terms of capturing and maintaining audience attention.
- Posts: Gives a side-by-side comparison of your brand’s and competitors’ latest posts, including the types of social media content or images you share and how audiences interact with them to show you what resonates better.
Don’t forget to track your own social media metrics
Remember not to focus so much on competitor analyses that you forget to track your own performance. Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) like engagements and follower counts will let you know whether the tactics you borrow from competitors are working or if you need to go back to the drawing board.
This can help prevent resource and time waste on efforts that don’t convert, allowing you to focus on those that do to improve your return on investment (ROI)—something brand owners are keen on when deciding whether to renew social media management contracts.
Sked’s social media analytics tools can help with this by showing your performance across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and TikTok.
These tools break down everything from your performance by social channel to your engagement by post and hashtag, showing you which social media platforms work best for your brand and the type of content that resonates with your audience. Our AI tools can also help by generating intelligent, actionable insights based on your performance reports.
Start tracking your competitors with Sked Social
Tracking your competitors’ activities and performance isn’t snooping—it’s a smart business move that reveals what works, helping you optimize your digital marketing strategy.
While you can monitor competitors manually, it’s time-consuming and can take attention away from strategic tasks, like developing your social media marketing campaign.
Your time is valuable: Monitoring tools are the way to go.
Sked Social is an all-in-one solution designed to support businesses like agencies and multi-location brands (like restaurant groups and hotel chains) in their social media marketing optimization efforts. Our platform lets you track up to 20 of your brand’s competitors and provides AI-powered reports and insights to show you what to improve, reducing manual work and guesswork.
Sign up for Sked today to streamline competitor monitoring and overall social media management.
