In social media, benchmarking measures the performance of brands in our sector that we are interested in, thereby evaluating our own activity in relation to them. In this way, we will know if our social media strategy works or will work, and at the same time, we will know where there is room for improvement.
Now you may be wondering, how do I do a competitor analysis? Well, it's very simple: by observing our competitors and analyzing what they are doing. Because the reality is that the closer you position yourself to your competitors, the better you will know if your social media strategy is on the right track.
Is it so important to analyze the competition?
The answer is yes. Competitor analysis will not only help you understand what they are doing on social media, but it will also give you an idea of how you stack up against them, and therefore, you can improve your own social media strategy .
It is not just about observing, but about using the data we have obtained, analyzing it and applying it to our own strategy so that we end up knowing what our strengths and weaknesses are .
So why should we conduct a competitor analysis?
It will help us to have a global vision of the sector in which we operate and to know what our competition is doing at all times.
It even helps us to analyse our social media strategy in depth . We can look at what our competitors are doing to find out which actions work for them and which don't, and in this way, learn from their mistakes and successes .
Our competitors' profiles will serve as a source of ideas to identify what is missing from our own strategy . We will also end up detecting certain aspects of our social media strategy that should be relevant and that had not been considered before.
We will be able to get to know our customers better , as well as their habits and interests. This will allow us, in addition to knowing how our competitors communicate with them, to implement more powerful social media marketing actions aimed at a much more specific audience.
Finally, analyzing our competitors' social media strategy will prevent us from stagnating , so we can continue to move forward to improve our position in the sector in which we operate.
Now that we know why we should conduct a competitor analysis, we need to identify who our competitors are on social media . To find out who plays in our league and who doesn't, we can conduct research taking into account several aspects:
Social media conversation analysis . This will help us understand how different competitors communicate with their audiences and how the conversation is distributed among different actors. Our mission should be to find a niche and capture the audience's attention.
Research hashtags on different social networks about topics that interest us. By doing this type of monitoring, we will be able to find other brands with similar objectives to ours.
Listen to your followers, and also to list of cuba consumer email those who don't follow you . We must pay attention to the conversation taking place on social networks. What is the dominant topic of conversation? Who is the most involved? And we will end up finding more information than we expect.
A very simple way to find your competitors is through a simple Google search . With a couple of keywords, we can find companies with similar profiles to ours to search for them on our social media channels and analyze them. It is as simple as, for example, if we have a bakery in A Coruña, searching for bakeries in A Coruña, keeping the first results and looking for them on our Twitter, Facebook or Instagram profile.
How to monitor our competitors on social media
Thanks to the metrics offered by different social networks, there are currently multiple ways to monitor , either directly from our competitors, or from conversations that occur on social networks that may be of interest to us.
Facebook , for example, offers data from 'Pages to watch', which compares the performance of our page and posts with other similar ones and also suggests other pages that would be interesting to monitor. Its operation is very simple and Facebook will give us, by default, the data of five competitors to add to our pages to watch, allowing us to choose whether we want to keep those five, or choose ourselves who we want to 'spy' on.