Points to consider in a competitor analysis

Sahail Ashraf posted on 15 February 2023

If you’re going to make real gains this year, you need to carry out a competitor analysis. This post will show you the key points you need to consider.

Conducting a competitor analysis is something that every brand should do, simply because it can give that brand a huge advantage. Understanding how a competitor manages their social media can give your brand new ways to improve engagement. But how do you ensure you’re conducting an effective competitor analysis?

First up, why?

Why should you do this anyway? Well, the following reasons are more than just compelling. For a business to grow on social media, these all make perfect sense.

You’ll find out the best times to post on social media. If your competitors are posting at certain times of the day, then you should be too. This is because your audience (which you share with your competitors) are online at those times. Completing an analysis tells you this.

You’ll also find content ideas that should help you improve the offering you have on social media. At the same time, you may also find content ideas that simply don’t work. And it’s those ideas you need to avoid.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you’ll gain an overview on how to differentiate your brand from the others in your space. Once you’re confident about what you’re doing, set some stretch goals around the content you create.

The keywords

Your first step is to identify the competitive keywords. Google is the very best place to look for this. Enter the keywords that are most closely linked to your brand and what you do into the search engine.

If you want to go deep, create a spreadsheet with the 30 top pages in the results. Otherwise, create the spreadsheet and enter the URLs of the top 10 pages.

These are your competitors. Depending on how deep you want to go you could even create separate entries on the spreadsheet for all your keywords. In any case, pretty soon you will know who you are up against.

Find the socials

Then, looking at the websites of these competitors, find where they link to their social media platforms on the pages.

These are the accounts you will be focusing on as part of your competitive analysis.

Once you have found their social channels you need to answer the questions below for each of your competitors:

Where do they hang out on social media?
What is the size and growth rate of their following?
Which of their followers are the most active?
What is their posting frequency?
Is their engagement rate high or low?
Is their social share of voice high or low?
Are they using the same hashtags all the time?
Do they use a lot of hashtags?

SWOT

This is where you carry out a SWOT analysis. The letters stand for:

Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats

This is not complicated. For the strengths you need to find where you are doing better than your competition. This includes looking at engagement and follower numbers and so on. The weaknesses are the opposite.

Opportunities are where you fill the the gap. Here, you identify where you can do better than your competitors are and start to plan accordingly.

Threats are a little more sophisticated. Here, you need to understand where your competitors are growing, and whether or not this spells trouble in the future. If you have a competitor that is steadily building follower numbers month after month, you need to not only identify how they do it, but also make plans to ensure you are competing with them.

The next steps

After you have done the above, it’s all about using your tools to create benchmark reports, and also focus on making sure you have the content that will help you fill the gaps your competition is creating.

A competitor analysis is always beneficial, because it gives you more confidence in your work (you know what you’re doing), and it also shows improvement to stakeholders.

Try Locowise for benchmarking and a full competitor analysis suite. It’s got all you need to make sure you beat the competition.