How To Use Competitive Intelligence To Outplay Your Social Media Competitors

The nature of social media means that there’s a lot of information available to you about brands you’re competing against, what they’re doing and what results they’re achieving. The same information is also available about you to your competitors.

It’s likely that some of this is already used against you to some degree. Competing brands might follow you on Instagram, keep a close eye on the content you’re posting and new activities you’re announcing. They might even do some data analysis to find bigger insights into how they compare to you.

You too should take advantage of all the information available and learn from your competitors. This can help you improve your overall strategy, optimise the different tactics, and fill the gaps that are missing.

Let’s look at how you can uncover the social media strategy of your competitors and use the insights to outplay them. But first, a new feature announcement.

New Feature: Your Competitors’ Facebook Impressions And Reach

Have you ever wished you could see the reach your competitors are getting on their Facebook content? You can now!

We’ve just launched our latest competitive intelligence feature: Facebook post impressions and reach for pages you are competing against. Add Facebook pages of your competitors to Locowise, and see their impressions and reach. Our machine learning algorithm predicts impressions and reach on both page and post level.

Where can you see your competitors’ reach and impression stats? See them on the individual post level in “Content” section, and get the charts on total page level impressions and reach in “Report” section when viewing a multiple profile comparison report. Login to your Locowise account now.

What other social media competitive intelligence should you gather

Here’s what else you can do to gather social media competitive intelligence, and what Locowise can do to help you make better-informed decisions:

Comparison of your profile versus your competition

focused on the audience growth trends, engagement, and best performing content. How fast is your profile growing compared to your competitors? How engaging is the content that you post? Which days of the week are the most engaging? What topics and type of content gets the highest engagement? This gives you a good idea of where you stand right now compared to your competitors. Is there something that you can learn from this? In what days of the week should you be more active? Should you be posting a different type of content more often?

Your share of voice compared to your competition

This can be done on both brand level and social media platform level. How many followers do you have across the different profiles you run on the various social media platforms? How does that compare with the audience size of your competitors? Does the picture change if you look at one particular platform only? Figure out how you stand right now. It can also give you an idea if there’s a platform that you could utilize a bit more.

Sentiment analysis for your competitors

on brand, page and post level. What are the people saying about your brand versus what are they saying about your competitors? Do they get a lot of negative comments? What topics are people complaining about?

Their posting frequency and a prediction

on when they will post next. How often do your competitors post content compared to you? When are they posting exactly? How is that working for them with regards to getting engagement? How does this all compare to your own performance and is this something you can learn from?

The percentage of posts they promote

using paid social media advertising. Are your competitors paying to boost their content? How large percentage of their posts are paid for using Facebook advertising? This is an easy way to see what you’re up against. It’s difficult to compete organically if the brands you’re competing against focus on paid promotion for the majority of their posts. An interesting number to show to your boss and see if you can get hold of a larger slice of the budget.

Prediction of their audience growth

over the upcoming weeks and months. How fast are you growing compared to your competitors? How are the things if you look at the specific platforms and the individual profiles? Is there something that stands out? This is a useful tool when creating plans for future and when you are asked to set targets for your growth.

Your competitors’ Facebook impressions and reach

on both page and post level. What type of content gets the highest impressions and reach for your competitors? How do the overall impressions and reach numbers compare to your own performance? Should you be working on improving the quality of the content that you post? Or should you consider increasing your posting frequency?

Gathering competitive intelligence in social media is a big job. There’s so much data available. It’s a big task to sift through it all and find the signal in the noise. If you do go through with it, you’ll find a lot of interesting insights that will help you make better decisions today and in the future.

Locowise is here to help if you don’t have the time or the expertise. Our machine learning algorithms can do the data crunching work for you and provide you with actionable insights that you can implement today.

Interested in getting competitive intelligence about your competition and improve your social media strategy? Enter Locowise right now. There’s a free 14-day trial waiting for you.