Keeping up with your competitors by having a peek at what they’re up to now and again is something any savvy and results-hungry businessperson should be looking to do. But why is it worth doing, and how do you get started?
Competitor Analysis on Facebook: The Why
Keeping an eye on the competition is a great way to stay ahead of the curve, and one of the best tools to do this is through competitor analysis. In terms of social media, Facebook is undoubtedly a powerful platform for getting a full picture of both yourself and your competitors.
By evaluating their content, followers, engagement rates, and other relevant metrics you’ll be able to understand what’s working for them – both in terms of their marketing strategy as well as what content resonates most with their audience.
Additionally, competitive research can help hone your own strategies and boost engagement by creating better content that stands out from the rest. Most importantly, conducting competitor analysis on Facebook will give you invaluable insight into how to continually innovate in order to stay ahead of the game!
Learn from their mistakes
Limit the mistakes you make by checking where your competitors may have gone wrong with their Facebook campaigns. Perhaps they’re not getting back to potential leads soon enough. Or maybe they’re leaving it too long between posts and losing followers.
Identify threats to your business
Don’t let your competitors be first to the party on emerging new trends and ways of doing things. It can be difficult to stay ahead of the competition when it comes to business – especially these days, as new players become a part of the market relatively quickly. Jump on new trends and the latest features as fast as you can to reap the benefits and keep monitoring competitors’ Facebook posts.
Get inspired
They say imitation is a form of flattery. So, if you’ve spotted some cool ideas for content on your competitors’ Facebook pages, why not tweak these and run with them yourself? This works both ways, though – in conducting research, you’ll also get to know the content that doesn’t work with your competitors’ audience.
Facebook Competitor Analysis: The How
Keyword research
The brands that rank for your keywords in Google are only sometimes those that appear more often on social platforms like Facebook. When doing your social media analysis, make sure you research who is coming up when you research for your keywords in the Facebook search box. This will show you the competitors who are getting found first by potential audiences.
Give them a follow and take a look at where you might be able to emulate them.
Use a dedicated competitor analysis tool
Doing things manually can make it really hard to analyse the data and information you’ve gathered about your competitors. Using one of the following tools can help you work smarter, not hard when carrying out competitor analysis:
- Buzzsumo: Helps you identify competitors’ most shared content.
- Hootsuite Streams: Track everything from keywords, hashtags, and competitors across Facebook.
- Brandwatch: Fantastic analysis tool produces a social share of voice graphic for you to see how much your business is being talked about online compared with your competitors.
- Mentionlytics: Allows you to carry out “sentiment analysis”, giving you insights into what is being said about your competitors online and how it is being said. This can help you monitor whether customers are happy or dissatisfied with particular services or products your competitors offer. This can help you identify unmet customer expectations and avoid making mistakes.
As a marketer, you will know how much people love to complain on social as opposed to leaving positive feedback (negative social media posts get twice as much engagement than positive posts). So, tapping into this vast pool of feedback can help you fill your competitors’ shoes when they have fallen short for their customers.
Top tip – Mentionlytics can be incorporated with integration with Hootsuite.
The moral of the story
Implement the steps above to improve your research of what your competitors are up to on Facebook and other social platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. These three platforms are a little different from Facebook, which is primarily used for social interaction, according to a study by Sideqik.
Influencer marketing plays a big part on these platforms (TikTok and Instagram mainly). So, remember that if you’re looking to track the competitors on these platforms, don’t forget to check which influencers they’re working with and the successes these influencers have brought them.
Need help with your social media content strategy? Our experts here at Social Media can do the hard work for you, carrying out the competitor research so that you can focus your attention on other areas of your business.
We produce comprehensive reports that will give you valuable information about the areas of your strategy that you need to re-examine or change. Just give us a call.
