Everything you need to know

Over the years, and with the advancement of technology, social media has become a vital part of the expansion of many businesses. With the rise of social media, companies are now able to connect with more people worldwide than ever before. The expansion of social media has also brought about the creation of sites and tools that allow you to track your competitors social media accounts and compare them to your company’s.

Some sites include;

• SEMrush

• Sprout Social

• Hootsuite

• Buffer Analyze

• Iconosquare

In a field as competitive as marketing, competitor analysis tools are a must. These tools and sites will allow you to get an edge up on your competitors and save you hours of the rigorous stalking of their social media platforms that would otherwise occur. Having a leg up on your competitors is crucial in this field because if you aren’t competing at the same level or above, then you’re losing revenue. These sites allow you to look at the type of content that your competitors are posting, how often they post, what consumers think about your competitors products and services, how much traffic their posts get, identify trends, etc.

Social media platforms that can be tracked and are most commonly tracked include; Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. These platforms are some of the most popular ones you’ll find and pretty much anyone you talk to nowadays has one(despite older generations….sorry gram and gramps). You’ll also find that almost every company, no matter the size, has at least an Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or all three and others! Because these platforms are the most favored they are also the most commonly tracked on these sites.

Working with LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is the premier platform in the Corporate space, focusing on career development and professional networking. Personal accounts are not able to be tracked, only business pages are.

The tracking process for this platform on SEMrush is as follows:

• Audience
  Your page’s total follower count over a given period of time. This allows you to track your potential growth or decline in your audience. You can customise the date range by selecting which dates you would like to see, by simply clicking the dates on the calendar.

• Followers Trend
  This display of a bar or line graph enables you to see your followers trend over time. With this you are able to view the amount of followers you are obtaining or not obtaining. Also, your followers trend can be categorised into daily, weekly, or monthly data.

• Competitors Comparison
  With this helpful tool, you will be able to directly compare your number of followers to those of your competitors. You are able to view your number of followers on both a total followers chart and a trend graph.

• Total Followers
  Lastly, the total followers chart gives you access to a breakdown of your competitors total followers and their changes in growth rates. This data can be sorted by either of the three metrics: total followers, change, or growth %.

Working with Facebook:

On SEMrush you can compare the prosperity of your Facebook page to that of your competitors in a number of different ways.

SEMrush separates its categories as follows:

• Posts
  In this section you can view your competitors recent Facebook posts. You can adjust the date range to see posts from as far back as you want. With the “post types” selector, you are able to see all types of posts, just photos, just videos, or just links. You can also filter posts by entering a hashtag of your choosing. This section also has a tab called Total Engagement, which is the sum of all the shares, likes and comments on a post.

• Audience
  This section offers a more in depth look at the company’s Facebook viewers. In this section you are able to see the summary of total page likes, number of likes within a certain date range, amount of audience change, and the growth %. At the bottom of the Audience section you can find two graphs. One titled Page likes trend and the other called Total page likes compared to competitors. These graphs allow you to look at your pages likes from a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and then compare them to your competitor’s.

• Activity
  This portion shows you the company’s posting habits and trends. You can look at how many posts the company has published in a certain time frame, as well as what types of posts engage the audience differently.

• Engagement
  This area shows a company’s total engagement on Facebook. That means it measures the sum of all comments, shares, and reactions on your profile. The Engagement Summary breaks down the total engagement number into specific reactions, comments, and shares columns. The last part of this section are the Comparison Graphs. These graphs display your company’s engagement with your audience compared to your competitors engagement with theirs.

• Hashtags
  This section lets you see the most intriguing hashtags used by you and your competitors. With this tool you can look at which companies used certain hashtags under the “Used by companies” tab. Also, the “Engagement per post” allows you to see the total engagement per post with each hashtag.

Working with Twitter:

Twitter is a platform that allows people to post whatever thoughts they have going on in their head. At a max of 140 characters to these thoughts can range from a random food craving someone has to what their political stance is.

This platform is also used by a wide range of people, varying from students, companies, politicians, policy makers, and the general public. Companies use it to promote their research, build relationships with followers and other companies, and just in general to reach new audiences. Tracking for this platform is sectioned into….

• Tweets
  This section analyses tweets from competing companies. Here you can compare how engaging, liked, and retweeted your posts are, compared with other companies. You can sort your columns by: engagement rate, total engagement, likes, replies or retweets. You also have the option to filter your tweets by hashtag or tweets type. Tweets type is then filtered by: photos, statuses, videos, and links. Users can also export a list of tweets from this report to a spreadsheet or PDF.

• Audience
  This tab allows you to review the size and growth of your company compared with your competitor’s. You are also able to evaluate the trend of your company’s overall Twitter follower count over a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The last graph in this section lets you view your company’s growth % relative to your audience size compared to that of your competitors.

• Activity
  This area gives you a better understanding of the behaviour of your competitors on Twitter. In a selected date range you are able to see the company’s total number of tweets, tweets per day, and any increase or decrease in the company’s tweeting behaviour. Users are also able to look at which type of tweets get the most engagement with their audience in comparison to their competitor's.

• Engagement
  This segment lets you view your engagement trends over time as well as your competitor’s. This graph gives you a breakdown of your score by likes, replies and retweets. The bar graph at the bottom also shows you your profile’s engagement rates on a daily basis over a selected date range.

• Hashtags
  This report allows you to view a list of all the hashtags used by a profile. Here you are able to see which competitors had the most success using certain hashtags that engaged their audience.

• Mentioners/Mentions
  This section gives you a list of all the Twitter profiles that mentioned your competitors. You are able to measure the amount of mentions your page gets verses your competitors.

Conclusion

We have not included Instagram, but that too can be easily tracked as it is owned by Facebook and Pinterest is also now incorporated in the main platforms. There are also other platforms such as Google My Business that can be easily measured as well.

Some of the newer social media platforms (such as TikTok) are not measured via the main publishing platforms. This is something that you should keep an eye on in the future, because if they provide to be viable in the long term, they main publishing sites will need to invest to incorporate them into their platform.

Article by Simon Tokic. Simon has a few passions including basketball, music and surfing, however, most of his time is spent as a self proclaimed marketing geek applying fundamental marketing principles in strategic and creative ways. Prior to running Sydney marketing agency Mind Methods, Simon worked on leading brands including Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Glad, Chux, Armor All, Clorox, Barbeques Galore, Anglicare and more.