The 5-Minute Social Media Competitive Analysis

In previous blog posts, we’ve talked about why you should monitor your competitor’s marketing strategy, and how to set up a monitoring dashboard to do so. But really, all that data you’re collecting on competitors is worthless if you don’t know what to do with it.

Smart data needs to lead to smart decisions.

And that means doing more than just hoarding competitor mentions in your dashboard. You need to sit down, dig in, and get analytical.

Monitoring your competitors isn’t enough – you need to sit down and analyze the data. Now, whether that is once a week, once a month, or once a quarter is completely up to you and the resources (both time, and available people) you have. But it needs to be done regularly. That is, if you want to improve your brand.
It’s all about setting up a routine.

In this blog post, I’ll be showing you how you can set up a quick routine to conduct social media competitive analyzes as regularly as you can.

To conduct your own social media competitive analysis, download our free cheat sheet to save for later!

What you’ll learn from a social analysis

By sitting down and taking the time to look at the data your social media monitoring or competitive dashboard has been bringing in, you’ll see exactly where your social media strategy stands, compared to your competitors.

From that, you can tell:

• Which brands in your industry hold the highest share of voice on social media
• What people are talking about in conversations about your industry and competitors
• What your industry is talking about to start the most buzz
• Which influencers are talking about your brand and competitors

Which trends and insights to look for

So, how will this help you build your social media strategy anyway?

You’ll see where your brand stands in relation to your industry, who the influencers of your niche are, which competitors are succeeding on social, and how they’re doing so.

• See where your brand stands: by looking at how often competitors are mentioned, the sentiment of what’s said, and other insights, you’ll be able to benchmark your brand’s market share. This will help measure the success of your social media strategy over time.
• Identify industry influencers: look at the important advocates talking about other companies in your industry to find influencers to work with on future social media and marketing campaigns.
• Measure your competitors’ success: see if a certain social campaign gave your competitor a big boost in engagement and mentions.
• Find pockets of opportunity: what isn’t your competitor doing, that’s leaving a hole in your industry? Leaning into that can help your brand stand out.

How to conduct social media competitive analysis in 5 minutes, using Mention

Once you have alerts set up to monitor competitors in Mention, creating a competitive analysis report should take about 5 minutes, tops.

You’ll want to have separate alerts set up for each competitor so that you can use Mention’s competitive dashboard, look at each competitor individually, and export data easily.

Here’s an example of competitive analysis of American Express, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank.

Click here to see the live dashboard.

To create individual social media reports:

1. Head to the alert you’d like to analyze, and go to ‘Statistics & Exports.’
2. Select the time period you want to look at, and any advanced filters you’d like to use, using the drop-down menus across the top of the statistics portal.
3. Through the main report, see the daily trends for your competitor’s mention activity, sentiment analysis, top sources and location, etc. You can also see what other keywords are being used in conversations about your competitor.
4. Download your report as a PDF, if you need to. This is where you can also export mentions to an Excel file, CSV, PDF, or TSV. It can be helpful to save a log of actual conversations to analyze later.
5. Switch over to the ‘Twitter Influencers’ to find the most influential members of the competitor’s community. Click through to look at the conversations the mentions came from.
6. Export the “My Influencer List”, along with important data about their social footprint, to an Excel file or CSV.

To create a competitive report and compare two or more brands:

1. In your Mention dashboard, click on “Reports,” and then select the “Create Report” at the top right. Next, find the Competitive Report:
   
2. Give your new report a name, choose the alerts you want to compare, and the time period you’re assessing:
   
3. Hit “Create Report.”
4. View activity trends for all brands in one dashboard. This includes sentiment analysis, top sources and locations, and peak activity hours.
   
5. If you want to filter your report by a certain source, sentiment, etc., hit the blue “Edit mode” button at the top of the screen. This lets you change any of the graphs you like, and remove any you’re not interested in.
6. To change the look of the report, click on the three little dots at the top right.
7. Schedule your report by clicking on the orange clock at the top of the screen. This lets you send your report to any email address in the world, at any frequency you choose.

So that’s a simple way to track the top content from a handful of competitors and their customers.

Mention also has competitive reports for social media to let you monitor audience growth, hashtags, and posting times:

To use these, you don’t even have to set up alerts or collect mentions! Just choose up to five accounts you want to compare, and Mention does the rest.

You’ll find these in the Reports tab, the same place you found the competitive report above.

Get more information about these, including a step-by-step guide to creating them here.

Tips for your social media analysis

Once you’ve created your reports and it’s time to dig into the data, here are some ideas on how to use it:

• Look for large spikes in social media activity for your competitors. Then go through the mentions to pinpoint why more people were talking about them than usual. Is it a successful strategy you could adapt?
• Pick out influencers talking about your competitors with negative or neutral sentiment. They’re less likely to be hardcore fans and might be more open to working with the brand’s competitors.
• Use the topic clouds to look at what else is being discussed in these conversations. Are there good opportunities for you to jump in or start your own?

You’ve got 5-minutes!

In 2019, listening to what your competition does and benchmarking your brand with their should not be a problem. Well, using Mention’s monitoring and reporting capabilities, it should be a walk in the park.

If you want to go further, check out out our guide to build and execute a competitor listening strategy from A to Z.

In the mean time, you can download this checklist to run a social media competitive analysis in 5 minutes.