Competitive analysis and benchmarking should be an important part of your social media measurement and reporting strategies. Each brand has its own strategies, goals, and execution tactics but you all are striving to reach and engage with the same consumer base. When you monitor and measure the effectiveness of campaigns run by other brands the data you gather can help drive your decision making without the expense and risk of trying them all yourself. This does not mean you should simply be a copycat brand, but understanding the competition will help you make informed decisions about your own strategy going forward and measure your own success with market context.
1. Compare Engagement Rates
To understand the impact of engagements rates you need to look at how you stack up against the competition. If you only focus your analysis inwards you may never move the needle in overall standing. By analyzing this data closely you can determine how your brand compares to your competitors which will enable you to pinpoint opportunities for growth, particularly where the competitors out perform you. Then you can identify what types of content other brands are using that is giving them this lift.
2. Measure Responsiveness Against Market Leaders
Social media moves fast and customers not only expect you to keep up with them but exceed their expectations. In fact, 47% of consumers expect a response to an online request within an hour. How you compare to the standards set by other brands in your industry can play a key role in retaining current customers and growing your business. By analyzing and understanding how your brand ranks within your industry can help set goals for your social media engagement.
3. Quantify Your Reach with Market Context
A third factor when analyzing your competitive landscape is understanding how your reach stacks up to competitors. Start off by evaluating both the sizes of your individual social networks as well as your combined social footprint. Now rather than delivering fan and follower data to management, you can report reach and trends in context to your market. And as with engagement rate, use this data to evaluate the tactics the competition uses to expand their reach and decide if any should be incorporated into your own strategies.
4. Measure Your “Share of Voice”
Not only is it important to understand how many people you are conversing with, you should evaluate how big your slice of the conversation is compared to your competitors. Is your brand a hot topic and making up a Yeti-sized slice? Or is there room for improvement? By looking at the competition you can evaluate their effectiveness of their strategies in comparison to yours.
5. Dig Deeper with Content Analysis
The final piece to this puzzle is something that has been alluded to throughout the post and answers the question: How does your content stack up? Every industry has its own optimal content. The key here is to stay ahead of the curve and continue to monitor what works best for your industry in each social channel. By going beyond the age-old saying of “Content is King” and optimizing your content mix and the frequency of your content you can position your brand in a top seat. As brands continually work to improve their content mix, valuable data can be garnered just by monitoring how their content performs.
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