How to Conduct a Social Media Competitive Analysis: Tips and Tricks

Social media has become a critical channel for businesses looking to boost revenue and profit. According to 2023 statistics, 77% of companies use social media to reach their customers. What's more, 41% of small businesses rely on social platforms as a key revenue driver. Translation? The competition is fierce. With so many players in the game, conducting a social media competitive analysis isn't optional anymore—it's essential.

These numbers are only going to climb. By 2028, an estimated 6 billion users will be active on social media. That means investing in your social media channels isn't just smart—it's necessary for business growth.

Understanding what works for your competitors and how their content stacks up against yours gives you a clear picture of your own performance. It also hands you the tools to refine your approach. If you've been wondering how to conduct a social media competitive analysis, you're in the right place.

This guide covers everything you need to know about competitive analysis on social media. From data collection strategies to drawing conclusions and presenting your findings, we've got you covered.

What Is Social Media Competitive Analysis?

Running your social media accounts in a vacuum is risky business. While it's important to invest resources in driving engagement and conversions, it's equally important to know what's happening with the competition.

Social media competitive analysis means identifying your biggest competitors and gathering information about their performance—both positive and negative—to compare it with your own. It's one of the most effective and systematic methods for examining how your online presence measures up.

This type of analysis forces you to look at indicators like follower count, posting frequency, engagement rate, and hashtags. When you dig into these metrics, you learn what works (and what doesn't), and you discover new methods to improve your plan.

👉 Need help tracking competitor data at scale? Check out Scrapingdog's web scraping solutions to automate data collection across multiple social platforms without getting blocked.

You examine key metrics like follower numbers, engagements, and reach across multiple platforms, noting their successes and the types of content that generate the most engagement. Then you use this data as a benchmark to compare your performance and identify methods to improve it.

Six Effective Tips for Conducting a Social Media Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis in social media marketing involves a series of tasks that need to be completed regularly. Planning is key to delivering insightful analysis and executing excellent work, which in turn helps establish and complete successful projects.

You should know exactly what tasks to perform at each stage and how to execute them perfectly. Let's break this down in detail.

1. Figure Out Your Brand Goals and Metrics

The first step in conducting a social media competitive analysis is figuring out your brand's goals and metrics. Before you look at what your competitors are up to, decide what you want for your brand.

Here are some questions that will help you figure out what you want for your brand:

• What goals do you want to achieve by marketing your brand on social media?

• How do these goals align with what you've already planned for your overall brand objectives?

• Which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) do you prefer to use to measure your brand's success compared to your competitors?

• Who are the ideal customers you want to reach with your social media marketing strategy?

Once you have answers to these questions, you can set clear goals and metrics for your brand.

2. Conduct a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is an excellent tool for evaluating your business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It helps you gain a clearer perspective on your brand's position in the competitive social media landscape.

Start by identifying your strengths where you meet or exceed industry benchmarks. These could be:

• High engagement rates

• A loyal audience

• Unique content

Next, analyze your weaknesses. This may include:

• Inconsistent posting schedules

• Lower engagement on certain platforms

• Lack of diverse content

Opportunities in your SWOT analysis might be:

• Trends you haven't tapped into yet

• Untapped audience segments

Look for areas where the competition falls short and find ways to fill those gaps. Finally, assess the threats. These could include:

• Stronger competitors

• Industry changes

• New platforms emerging that you haven't explored yet

Use tools to streamline the SWOT analysis process. With advanced analytics capabilities, you can easily gather data and insights to create a comprehensive SWOT analysis. Use these deeper insights after completion to adjust your social media strategy and stay one step ahead of the competition.

3. Identify Your Competitors

After you've set your brand goals, you need to determine who your main competitors are in the industry. Focus on brands whose services or products are closest to yours. You probably already know who they are.

To start, you should target three to five competitors. Examine each of their social media profiles. You'll most likely want to target the companies with the most followers and activity.

If you don't know your biggest competitors, Google them! Search for terms linked to your solution. A keyword tracker makes it easier to analyze these terms and monitor their performance changes over time.

For example, if you own a sporting goods company, type "sporting goods company" or "sporting goods manufacturer" into Google. The results displayed are potential competitors for your analysis. It's that simple!

Now you can select brands from this search to conduct your analysis and examine the results. But isn't this a social media competitive analysis? Yes, it is! Therefore, you need to ensure that your search results also rank as top results on the targeted social media platforms.

You just need to go to the search bar of the platform you want results for. Then type the term into the search bar and look at all the accounts and hashtags displayed there. Finally, select the ones you think are your potential competitors that you want to analyze.

4. Start Collecting Your Competitors' Social Media Data

The next step is to collect social media data. You can use one of two methods.

First, you can collect social media data manually. Visit your selected companies' social media pages and note their followers, likes per post, interactions, shares, and more.

Many social media networks, like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, include native analytics tools. These tools support you in scraping data about your competition.

However, this is a time-consuming and inefficient method. Here you have to visit each social media channel individually and enter all the data into a spreadsheet.

Since follower and like counts constantly fluctuate, the data is never completely up-to-date. Additionally, it's much harder to make comparisons across multiple channels and calculate sophisticated metrics.

A third problem is that this is a manual data entry approach that can be time-consuming, consume financial resources, and lead to errors and omissions. In the age of 24/7 social media cycles, it's highly unsustainable. This is a major problem since social media competitive analysis is a process that must be carried out consistently throughout the year.

The second alternative is to automate social media data collection. Tools like Predis.ai collect public data from your competitors' social media accounts and bring everything together in one place.

This way, you get precise, complete, and up-to-date data from your social media competitive study. This allows you to derive relevant comparative insights.

You simply need to add the company profiles you want to monitor. Predis.ai's competitive analysis dashboards provide accurate and up-to-date information in a single location.

👉 Want to automate competitor data extraction without technical hassles? Scrapingdog makes web scraping simple with reliable APIs that handle proxies, CAPTCHAs, and rate limits for you.

5. Analyze the Social Media Data You've Collected

After you've gathered your data, it's time to start evaluating it. Analysis can be considered a broad term with multiple applications. To create clarity, we prefer to understand it as an analysis that encompasses a series of questions that provide insights.

Check Which Brand Has Remained Consistent Over Time

Consistency is essential on social media. It's all part of the process of building a successful brand. When evaluating your competitors, consider how consistently they've delivered content.

Depending on the indicators you're looking at, you should know whether a brand has been consistent or dropped the ball somewhere.

Where Are Your Competitors Underperforming?

Can you identify areas where your competitors appear to be delivering no results?

It may take a bit more work to figure this out. Once you've defined what "underperformance" looks like, you can immediately see where the competition is failing.

For example, look at engagement rates relative to the number of published articles. This is a simple approach to determine if the competition is failing.

Here are some questions to consider:

• Can you determine the average number of likes, shares, and reactions they receive?

• How does one brand compare to all the others?

• Which brand receives the least engagement?

• How big is your competitor's audience on the social media platform you want results for?

• Is the engagement ratio high or low considering audience size?

• How do you determine low or high engagement rates for your specific brand or industry?

What Types of Content Are Top Performers and Why?

Identifying high-performing social media materials will be one of the most important components of your study. Don't settle for just determining whether blog articles or videos are effective—go deeper instead.

Pay close attention to your competitors' videos. Study them.

Here are some questions to consider:

• Was the video structured and what does the structure include?

• How long is each video on average?

• Who appears in their videos?

• What types of information do they share?

• Do they make any offers?

• How strong are their calls-to-action?

How Often Do Your Competitors Publish Content?

It's also important to understand the regularity with which your competitor publishes content. Frequency matters because all businesses need to promote themselves to stay relevant, but they all have financial limits.

Yes, some companies have higher resources, but that doesn't guarantee they know how to use them efficiently.

When you examine your competitors' social media post frequency, you can categorize the types of posts they produce by format. This allows you to observe what type of content people are focusing on.

You can develop a strategy for your content creation based on content that's proven to be successful. First, however, you need to identify the brands' content types. This step is also crucial for presenting the competitive landscape and effectively communicating the results of your analysis to stakeholders or your internal team.

6. Take Action

After you've finally gotten to know your marketing team, implement your insights and start adjusting your social media plan. Try out some new hashtags that your competitor has used that you haven't used before.

Alternatively, you could also provide more evergreen content, as this type of content generates high interaction rates for your competitors. You should include newly found keywords in your account bios to make your brand visible to consumers who are actively searching.

No matter which path you choose, the important thing is to put what you've learned into practice and not be shy about experimenting. After all, why did you conduct a social media competitive analysis in the first place?

Four Tools for Social Media Competitive Analysis

Want to take a look at what's going on in your neighboring business? Want to track, analyze, and learn from your data and competitors' strategies?

Here are four social media competitive analysis tools to help you gather information to boost your marketing campaign:

1. Predis

Let's take a look at Predis's competitive analysis tool. The tool allows you to dive deep into your competitors' content patterns and view the best and worst performing content. Additionally, you can easily take a look at the hashtag set used by your competitors.

This allows you to understand what type of content works best for your competitors. Additionally, you get a glimpse of the hashtag set that drives post engagement.

Now you just need to use this information to validate your future campaign ideas. Otherwise, simply use this information to get inspired for your next post ideas.

Since its analysis tool provides deep insights into industry trends and competitor behavior, you can now prepare to court your customers by presenting them with in-depth analysis reports on market strategies.

2. BuzzSumo

Ready to track the key performance indicators in your competitors' marketing activities? Then BuzzSumo is just right for you. With BuzzSumo's competitive analysis tool, you get answers to:

• What content works best?

• Which are the top-performing networks?

• Which audience shares their content?

• How does your content compare to theirs?

Now you can sit back and take a look at the top-performing content on relevant topics from specific competitors. It looks not only at interactions but also where content has been shared on the web.

This helps you know whose content is at the top of the industry. Additionally, you have the opportunity to explore the latest potential trending topics on your own.

3. Ahrefs

With Ahrefs' competitive analysis tool, you can examine key aspects of your competitor's website, such as:

Organic Traffic Performance

You can check what keywords your competitors are using and how much traffic these keywords bring to their websites. Ahrefs monitors millions of keywords at various locations, allowing you to estimate a website's organic search traffic on Google.

Backlink Profile

Since it has the industry's fastest backlink crawler, you can track the backlinks used by your competitors' websites. You can also analyze the quality of the backlinks they're using.

Paid Traffic Performance

This allows you to check if your competitor is interested in paid search engine advertising. Additionally, you can even track where they're directing their paid traffic.

Furthermore, Ahrefs provides you with historical data from more than 7 years. This way, you can track your competitor's previous keywords, backlinks, and traffic history. Now you can use this through research to improve your company's performance.

4. Alexa

Alexa is competitive intelligence software that offers keyword research, competitive websites, audience analysis, and SEO analysis.

Here you have a great opportunity to get to know your competitors' audience in the industry. This tool's competitive analysis helps you identify customer persona demographics, content strategy, PID traffic targeting, and more.

Additionally, you'll learn about new competitors in the industry. This allows you to compare your website's traffic and engagement with your competitors. You can also easily determine your brand's website visibility compared to your competitors.

So choose the one that suits you best using the competitive analysis tools mentioned above. These tools are very useful for keeping track of your competitors' progress in the industry.

Why Conduct a Social Media Competitive Analysis?

1. Gain Insights into Industry Trends

To stay relevant and competitive on social media, it's important to stay up-to-date on industry trends. Analyze your competitors to see what content formats, hashtags, and platforms are trending.

By regularly tracking these trends, you can adapt your content strategy to what works. Use tools like predis.ai to track trends across multiple platforms and keep your strategy current.

2. Reach New Audiences

One of the biggest benefits of competitive analysis is finding new audience segments. By analyzing your competitors' engagement, you can find demographic groups you haven't reached yet. This gives you a plan for how to expand your reach.

For example, if your competitors are resonating with a younger audience you haven't previously targeted, you can tailor your content and messaging to appeal to that audience. Use insights from competitive analysis to refine your audience targeting and create content that resonates with new groups.

3. Identify Improvement Opportunities

Competitive analysis helps you find areas where your competitors are outperforming you. You have the opportunity to adjust your strategy and improve your social media metrics. By analyzing their content and engagement strategy, you can see where they perform well and find opportunities to improve your own strategy.

Tools like Predis.ai allow you to track and improve your performance by observing your competitors. Use this data to close gaps in your strategy and stay competitive. With the right adjustments, you can boost your social media performance and keep up with or even beat the competition.

4. Stay One Step Ahead of the Competition

To stay ahead, you need to consistently keep an eye on your competition. Use social media monitoring tools to track conversations around your brand and your competition. This gives you an idea of how your brand is perceived compared to others in your industry.

Wrapping It Up

Analyzing your direct competitors' actions is a crucial component of any marketing plan. So now you know that social media usage is widespread worldwide. Understanding how complex your competitors' social media usage is can give you a significant competitive advantage. This should also be the goal of any organization.

If you want to boost your brand's social media performance, consider partnering with Predis.ai's competitive analysis tool to get timely access to quality data and activate a strategy.

You can also leverage Predis.ai's superior AI-powered content generation capabilities and data-driven analytical approach to automate the generation of high-quality content that drives engagement, conversations, and conversions.

For more informative posts on social media tips and tricks, visit Predis AI.