An essential factor in the growth of your brand is analyzing your competitors’ performance and progress on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media competitor analysis will help you figure out what works best and, more importantly, what doesn’t work.

Taking the social media competitor analysis

Luckily, taking the social media competitor analysis is not as difficult as it sounds. Here are the steps to follow in analyzing your competitors:

1. Groundwork

To begin with, you need an excel or a google sheet to record the data you obtain from the analysis. You can also use free templates available on google to save some time. You can also use a story saver tool from toolzu.com to download Instagram Stories of your competitors to analyze them later as Stories last for 24 hours only. Toolzu provides a wide variety of tools and services to help you with Social Media analysis and marketing. They specialize in Instagram growth services along with other platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and more.

2. Identifying competitors

Starting the analysis, you need to learn your top direct and indirect competitors. You might already know the keywords you aim to rank for in search engines, but if you don’t, you can use the free tool, Google Ads Keyword Planner.

1. You need to enter your website URL in the tool, and you’ll get the relevant keywords with some additional data.
2. After you’ve found the keywords, search the relevant ones, at least 8, on Google. Scroll through the Search Engine Result Pages and go through top competitors’ websites. Also, note down the competitors paying for Google Ads to be on the top.
3. Your competitors will have their social media links on their websites. Go through their social media since the top competitors on search engines don’t need to also be at the top on social media.
4. Choose 2-10 competitors closest to your brand to examine for your analysis.
5. Analyzing

Now that you’ve narrowed down your competition, you get to the analyzing part. To make the process easier, the following are some questions you should keep in mind:

• What social media platforms do they use?
• How many followers do they have, and at what rate are they increasing?
• How active are they on their social media?
• What is the tone of their content?
• How do they engage with their audience?
• What is the engagement [like, comment, share and save] on their post?
• What is their X factor?
• Do they use ads to promote their posts?
• What are the hashtags they use?
• How do they handle criticism and negative comments?
• What is their most liked post? And the least liked?
• What social media approaches and strategies worked for them and what didn’t?

Apart from gathering the answers to these questions, you can run a SWOT analysis to get better results.

4. Keep up to date

Social media analysis is not a one-time thing. You need to mark and record the changes for the best outcomes. You can update your analysis once every couple of months or six months, depending on whether your industry is stagnant or constantly changing.

Conclusion

Running a social media competitor analysis will help your business grow in the right direction by identifying opportunities and avoiding your competitors’ mistakes. You can also use free and paid tools to save time and effort.