Competitor analysis is an important part of business planning – this now extends to keeping tabs on your competitors online.
It helps to build knowledge on how competitors are talking to their audience, the type of content they are sharing and how an audience interacts and engages.
Competitor analysis is also useful to identify social media platforms that you may want to consider using and to understand how competitors are using a particular platform.
This is a useful investment of your time before you start to use social media and is something you should be doing on a regular basis when reviewing your social media strategy.
What is competitor analysis?
To put it simply, competitor analysis involves keeping tabs on your competitors, helping you to discover what they are doing and how they are using social media.
You can monitor what your competitors are doing online – including the type of content they are sharing, when they are sharing it and who they are interacting with – and you can also monitor interaction and engagement.
Why should you do this?
You can learn how they are using social media and gain an idea of what their social media marketing strategy looks like. You can identify where their main online presence is, who their target audience is and how they are interacting with this audience.
You will be able to make an informed decision on which social media platforms best suit you.
Creating the content is a challenge for everyone – analysing how others use social media will help you to shape your content plan. It will provide you with inspiration on the variety of topics you could talk about, how to structure your content and the best way to use photographs and images.
Video content is a great way to engage your audience so it is could be useful to consider how others are using video online.
This is an important part of creating an effective social media strategy. By using these findings you should be able to begin planning how you can use social media to improve your online marketing.