Competitive benchmarking. Why does it matter and what can it tell you?

Sophie Beard posted on 9 June 2021

If your client asked you how their social media performance compares to competitors, could you answer? When it comes to social media activity you don’t just have to be on top of your clients’ accounts, but competitors too. 

Social media is an increasingly crowded space so you need to be able to make the best decisions to ensure your content is seen in the right place and at the right time. By monitoring exactly what competitors are doing you have the context to know if what you’re doing is successful or if you need to rethink your strategy. To do this, you need to stay in the know with consistent auditing.

With our leading edge competitor benchmarking, you gain these essential insights into the marketing and advertising of competitors. You’ll be able to create better, more successful content than the competition. If you’re an agency, this means you can bring real, tangible ROI.

What can competitor benchmarking tell you?

• ✔️ You can see where the opportunities are and spot any gaps and trends. Find the weaker parts of your competitor’s campaign, and exploit them by creating better content in the space they can’t fill.

• ✔️ Track specific KPIs – what does success look like for your client? How are you achieving this compared to competitors?

• ✔️ How does engagement compare and the best type of content? Likes and retweets imply that the content shared is what your target audience wants to see. Does this also link to a specific type of content, do videos get more engagement than photos? You can hone in on the kind of content that gained your competition more retweets than anything else.

• ✔️ Compare the audience growth over the upcoming weeks and months.

• ✔️ See your share of voice compared to your competition.

• ✔️ Do sentiment analysis for your competitors on brand, page and post level. See how loved your posts are and how the scores compare. 

• ✔️ Does the posting frequency differ? It’s important not to over post, or worse, not enough.

• ✔️ See a prediction of when competitors will post next – so you get one step ahead and see if there’s a better time for you to post your content.

• ✔️ See the percentage of posts they promote using paid social media advertising.

Things to consider to make a start

• Who are the competitors you want to track?
• What are your social media goals? Use this to select the metrics you want to track and see how you’re performing compared to competitors. 
• The number of followers typically impacts engagement rate, as highlighted in the Glocal Digital Report, April Statshot. It’s also important not to focus too much on the number of followers, would you rather quantity or quality?

With a free trial of Locowise you can start your competitor benchmarking. Be a better, more informed agency and impress your clients with your knowledge to begin making important decisions to grow your clients social media presence.