Social media for business can be a real treasure trove. New opportunities, new customers to reach, perhaps even new revenue streams. While this is all true, it’s just as important to remember another crucial aspect in which social media can help your business: keeping an eye on your competition.
In all likelihood, your rivals are on social media, just like you. But do you know how they’re performing and what they’re doing right or wrong? Are there any insights you can gain from looking at their social media strategies?
In this article, we’ll delve into the crucial topic of social media competitor monitoring and help you understand what it is, how to conduct it, and how it can propel your business forward.
Let’s jump in.
What is social media competitor monitoring?
Before we examine the benefits of social media competitor monitoring (and discuss how you can craft your own monitoring strategy), it’s worth clarifying what we mean by “social media competitor monitoring.”
Social media competitor monitoring is the practice of tracking and analyzing how your rivals are faring in the online social media space.
Monitoring your competitors’ social media presence helps you in two main ways:
- It allows you to stay on top of your main competitors’ strategies and successes
- It enables you to review your own performance and spot any areas for improvement
While social media competitor monitoring can sometimes be confused with social media competitor analysis, the two are not the same thing. Social media competitor analysis is only part of social media competitor monitoring, whereas the latter identifies a broader and more articulated strategy, as we’ll see shortly. It’s similar to looking at customer support vs. customer service.
Social media competitor monitoring also applies to all sorts of companies in all sorts of industries. It doesn’t matter if you are a small IT startup using LinkedIn to promote its newest business text messaging software, or if you leverage both Facebook and Instagram to market your latest fitness gear.
When developed correctly, a well-thought-out social media competitor monitoring strategy can benefit any company looking to stay ahead of its competitors across a range of social media platforms.
Social media competitor monitoring: 7 ways it can help your business
With social media competitor monitoring, you can gain access to a wealth of vital insights into your rivals. But how does this benefit your business?
Below, we’ll discuss seven ways in which a strong social media competitor monitoring strategy can help propel your company forward.
1. Spot trends and opportunities
One of the biggest benefits you can achieve through social media competitor monitoring is the ability to spot trends and opportunities ahead of others.
Is there anything specific that your customers are talking about on social media? How are your competitors addressing those requests? What are you currently doing, and what could (and should) you be doing better?
This also applies to strategies and marketing. Social media competitor monitoring can help you spot successful strategies and campaigns other businesses use and lead you to develop your own successful marketing ideas.
With social media competitor monitoring, you can also anticipate increased demand for a specific product or service. Armed with these insights, you’ll be in a great position to shape current and future actions meaningfully and profitably.
Let’s go back to our imaginary IT startup that’s very active on LinkedIn as an example. By monitoring its main rivals on the platform, the startup finds out that one of the biggest topics of interest of their audience is finding a clear explanation of a softphone (aka a software-based phone).
In response to this, the startup writes an insightful LinkedIn post on the subject and participates in online webinars and talks to showcase their knowledge and expertise. The result? They raise brand awareness, expand their network of contacts, and even land a bunch of new customers. This is the power of social media competitor monitoring in action.
2. Boost customer engagement and retention
What brand doesn’t want to boost its engagement on social media? Regardless of how good your current rate is, there’s always room to improve and do more. With social media competitor monitoring, you can achieve just this.
By looking closely at what your rivals are doing to connect with their audiences, you can craft strategies that truly speak to your target customers.
For example, you provide omnichannel contact center solutions to other businesses. You might find that your direct competitors regularly post user-generated content in the form of customer reviews, how-to videos, or explanations of multichannel vs. omnichannel.
This results in them achieving sky-high engagement and retention rates. So, why not try to do something similar on your social media pages, and see what the outcome is?
3. Foster better decision-making
When you monitor your competitors, spot trends and opportunities in advance, and boost your customers’ engagement and retention rates, there’s a natural follow-up: better decision-making.
Whether you’re interested in prospecting sales, marketing a specific product or solution, or anything else, social media competitor monitoring can enable you to make more informed, accurate, and profitable decisions for the future of your business.
All these decisions will be based on the tangible and verifiable facts and data that you have gathered through your competitor monitoring and analysis. This means that you can bid farewell to guesswork and sloppy attempts at promoting your business and say hello to laser-focused decisions that bring in real results.
4. Improve present and future performance
The point above nicely leads us to another important and related benefit: your overall performance. Once you have implemented solid, data-driven strategies that help you overtake your rivals, your performance will improve.
This applies to both your present and future performance; it may include better customer targeting, higher customer satisfaction scores, and a boost in engagement and retention rates.
Imagine that you have discovered that one of your main competitors is currently ranking high on SERPs for keywords that are relevant to you, too. In this case, you’ll know that you want to focus on enhancing your SEO performance.
Therefore, you decide to create and post high-quality social media content that targets those keywords, letting you enter the conversation and presenting yourself as an authority on the matter.
5. Keep your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment
While it may not sound like it’s strictly related to your competitors, customer sentiment is certainly another aspect worth mentioning when it comes to social media competitor monitoring.
So far, we have discussed engagement rates, brand awareness, and customer satisfaction scores. Of course, these are crucial data points—but they’re mostly numbers. And as you know, customers are human beings with pain points, desires, and expectations.
Through specific social media competitor monitoring tools, you can keep a close eye on customer sentiment, which helps you decipher how your target audience feels about a particular brand, product, or service.
Make sure that you know what your target audience is saying about your competitors. This will enable you to understand where competitors shine and where they fail, allowing you to shape your strategies accordingly.
6. Enhance brand reputation
After you gather and interpret all the relevant data about customer sentiment, you’ll be able to boost your reputation, which is vital for any brand with a strong digital presence.
Again, this can be done via social media competitor monitoring: by tracking what’s being said about your competitors and your company, you’ll know exactly what your customers want, need, complain about, and rave about.
When you are aware of this, you can take proactive measures to improve any negative or poorly performing areas, whether it be a specific product that doesn’t seem to make your customers happy or the way your customer support team deals with queries and requests for assistance.
7. Fill gaps in your overall social media strategy
It doesn’t matter if your social media pages are making your unique value proposition crystal clear to your audience; if the rest of your social media strategy has gaps, the whole ship is still running the risk of sinking.
With competitor monitoring, you’ll be able to identify what your social media strategy is currently lacking and how to rectify this to stay ahead of your rivals. Are your competitors sharing lots of engaging and informative blog posts, whereas you’ve never written one?
Consider it your sign that things need to change.
How to conduct effective social media monitoring
Now you know what social media competitor monitoring is and the incredible benefits it can bring you. How, then, can you put it into practice? We’ve detailed four crucial steps to help you do that.
1. Choose who to monitor
First, you’ll need to determine who among your competitors you want to keep tabs on. Depending on your company size and industry, you might have lots or very few competitors, but in any case, it may be wiser to start by selecting the top three.
Pick one direct competitor (a company that has pretty much the same, or very similar, offering as you), one indirect competitor (a company that has the same target audience but offers slightly different solutions), and one potential competitor (a company that’s currently not in your market but could be at any time).
You can identify your competitors by using specific software tools or by conducting a search on Google or another search engine, as well as on social media.
2. Identify what to monitor
Once you have zoomed in on your top three competitors, it’s time to select what specific aspects you want to keep an eye on. It all depends on your business goals as well as the time and budget you have available.
Generally speaking, the following can be useful starting points to consider:
- Brand mentions
- Engagement rates
- Unique impressions
- Customer sentiment
- Brand awareness and reputation
- Overall social media performance
- Sales and marketing strategies
- Market share
- Customer reviews.
3. Select the right monitoring tools
Any successful digital strategy heavily relies on using the right tech stack. For example, you’re probably already leveraging reporting tools and a customer relationship management solution.
Incorporating AR automation into your social media monitoring tools can significantly streamline data collection and analysis, making it faster and more accurate to track competitor activities and gauge customer sentiment.
In terms of social media competitor monitoring, you’ll need to add a few more pieces to your existing toolkit. Here are some examples:
- Google Trends
- Ahrefs
- Brand24
- SimilarWeb
- BuzzSumo
- SproutSocial
Each of these tools focuses on a specific monitoring area, including:
- Mentions monitoring
- Customer sentiment
- Online presence and reputation
- Marketing and hashtag campaign monitoring
- Topics and conversation monitoring.
Depending on what you intend to monitor, you can implement just one or a combination of two or more.
4. Check the findings and conduct your analysis
At this stage, you should have collected a lot of great data: now is the time to analyze it and glean insights from it.
For example, you may want to find out more about your competitors’ specific strategies on one social media platform in particular. Or, maybe you’re interested in customer sentiment across different platforms. What about your rivals’ market position? You can uncover this, too.
Whatever your questions, a solid social media competitor monitoring strategy should be able to provide an answer that enables you to shape meaningful and profitable future actions.
To analyze the data points you have gathered, consider following one of these approaches:
- Comparing KPIs and specific metrics
- Evaluating content performance
- Reviewing social media marketing activities
- Trying to spot trends over time
Key takeaways
Social media competitor monitoring can help you stay ahead of your rivals. As we have seen in this article, this type of monitoring can allow you to identify trends and opportunities, fine-tune your decision-making, and improve your customer engagement and retention.
So, what are you waiting for? Start monitoring your rivals today and prepare to take your business to the next level!
These views are made solely by the author.
