In the great world of social media there are more and more competitors for brands. They strive to stand out, to be original, to attract attention and be seen both by their current customers and to get futures.
A great way to improve our strategy in Social Media is to study in detail what they do and how they move our competitors in social networks.
Why is it important to know about our competition?
- To identify your weaknesses
- To learn from your mistakes, for example a bad campaign on Facebook Ads will provide valuable data that we can apply to our
- To inspire us with your actions and get new ideas. For example a publication that has reached a high level of engagement on Twitter can provide us with data such as appreciating what will be the best strategy on Twitter
- To know what users think about brands
- To discover opportunities
- To be one step ahead of the competition, differentiating ourselves from the competition
- To identify opportunities with new leads
- To discover the part of the market less covered by our competition and evaluate if we are interested in that niche
How should it be measured?
The first thing to do is to consider some indicators or KPIs. I give an example in the case of Twitter:
- The number of followers that have a mark
- Tweeter frequency
- Type of tweets (of the blog of the mark, news of the sector, etc.)
- With how many follows grows per week
- Number of retweets you get per week
- Number of mentions
- Interaction and participation, ie how the brand interferes in conversations with other users to give opinion or advice
- If the comments that are obtained are positive or negative
- The time it takes for the brand to respond to its followers
- How they motivate their users
These same issues have to be adapted to each of the social networks in which our brand is.
Of course we now have the question: and how am I going to measure all this data? Luckily there are endless tools, which make the life of the Community Manager of a company easier.
Some interesting tools to measure your competition:
- SocialBro: This tool helps you evaluate each step of your competitors, comparing their actions and the growth of their communities with yours.
- Woorank: Analyze the content, penetration, reach and quality of any blog or web regardless of whether or not the user requesting the report is the owner of the report, identifying the strongest and weakest points of the blog or page.
- Socialcrawlytics: with which you can identify the contents most shared by your competitors and in which social networks are shared.
- Wilfire Monitor: allows you to view and compare the momentum of evolution in up to three profiles through Google, Twitter and Facebook.
- Twentytweet: to measure your competition on Twitter
Of course it is very important to know how to interpret the results obtained from these measurements since it is fundamental to understand the situation of our brand with respect to the competition. My personal advice is that from the beginning of the project we measure these data on a weekly basis, making a monthly report that is going to come very well.