As per our last article How To Set Social Media Goals To Help Keep Your Strategy On Track In 2022 where we showed you how to set goals for your strategy. We decided now to show you how to base your strategy on your positioning in the market.
Did you already think about what is your competition up to? I’m sure a lot of people did, but what to do with such a thought? This activity is often formalised in large companies. Operations managers in large companies typically conduct competitive analysis as part of the preparation of annual plans but what if you don’t have any operational manager in your company? Competitive analysis may also involve a lot of extensive studies on things like branding, etc… from time to time. Some industries practice reverse engineering to figure out how a competitor’s technology or software works. In fact, a competitive analysis can often reach impressive complexity. Small businesses often find themself in the need of keeping track of their competition, but can’t manage a proper research. Thanks to this guide you’d not have to worry about it, since well show you a system on what to do and when to do it.
Competitor analysis can benefit you in multiple situations:
– Maybe you’re launching a new product and need to know how to position it,
– Maybe your brand is feeling stale and you need ideas to engage existing customers,
– Maybe you noticed your sales growth slowing, and you would like to re-target because of Apple’s iOS14 changes,
– Or perhaps you simply have some downtime in your marketing schedule and want to sharpen up your message and Ads in relation to your competitors.
So, want to know how to figure out what your competition is up to and stay one step ahead of them?
This analysis shows you how strong your business social media strategy is (compared to that of your competitors). It also helps you uncover new social media opportunities and potential threats to your business. It will show you insights like who is the competitor of yours on social media, which social media does the competition use, or how they craft their content / Ads for social media feed.
Why should you do a competition analysis on social media?
As we noted, social media competition analysis can supply you with a lot of information about your audience (which is likely to coincide with your competitors’ audience).
These insights can guide your social media marketing strategy. They include things like:
– Exploration of new market trends and topics
– Provides you with a benchmark against which you can measure your growth
– Niches or opportunities that you, or the other brands in your industry aren’t taking advantage of yet
– The best time to share content on social media (as your audience will probably be online at a similar time)
– Tactics that perform well (and those that don’t) for your Social media marketing competitors audiences
– Unique content and tone of voice inspirations for what may resonate with your audience
– You will be able to see if your price is competitive enough in your positioning
How to figure out what your competition is up to on Facebook?
Let’s just say for the sake of our article that our biggest competitor is Adidas. Just for the sake of illustration let’s take a look at how to take a sneak peek on your competition. So let’s visit the official page of Adidas on Facebook.
Once you’re on the profile page of your researched competitor, scroll down so you can see the “page transparency” section. Then click on “See all”
From there, you’ll see a pop-up with a lot of interesting insights and also general information like address or history of the page. In the pop-up you’ll see some very interesting insight – People who manage this Page. So you can see that for this example, our competitor page has 37 users that are managing it. And the most useful section for us now is the “Ads from this page” section where we can go to the Ad library of our competitor.
Once you are in the Ad Library, you will be able to see all of the Ads your competitor ever did on their Facebook / Instagram page. You can even hit the CTA button and see what their landing page looks like.
And this is their landing page, which takes you straight to the showcased product shop page.
Summary
All in all, tracking your competitors’ social media activity will help you better understand the market and set the right goals for your business social media presence.
However, at the end of the day you still have to put in the work to get the most you can out of it. You can put together a single social media competitive report (for example, if you’re just starting out on social media) or hire someone on a marketplace like Fiverr to track your competitors’ activities on social platforms on a regular basis.
So now, we learned what it is, the most important thing that comes afterward – How to make one? We will show it to you next week. The main point of this article was to show you why to conduct a social media competition analysis, and the next week’s article will be a step-by-step guide on how to make one. We’ll also prepare for you the best tools and free insights to help you get on track.
Don’t want to wait until the next week?
take a look on our previous post like What to Post on Instagram This Month: 10 Photo & Video Ideas to Spark Inspiration or check out our series from the marketing professional The Most Common Mistakes In Facebook Advertising in the meantime.
