Analyzing your competitors – on social media or in the real world – is essential for succeeding, outperforming others and staying strong in your field. Collecting data and information about your competitors gives you a real understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, so you can build a successful marketing plan and a stronger marketing strategy for your product.
In short, competitors pose a risk to your business – and knowing them and seriously studying everything they offer reduces that risk.
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Types of Social Media Competitors
First, who exactly is a competitor?
A competitor is a person or company that offers the same product as you, or a similar one – in other words, someone operating in your field. Simply put, we can divide all competitors into three groups:
- Direct competitors: These are the most dangerous competitors of all, because they offer the same product, target the same customers and solve the same problem as your product.
- Close competitors: They offer a service or product very similar to yours, to the same type of target customers – but solve the problem in a slightly different way than your product does.
- Indirect (distant) competitors: They target a type of customer you don’t target, so they don’t pose a direct threat to you.
Although competitors vary in how much of a threat they pose, you should take all of them into account – each one represents either a direct or indirect risk. Here are the best ways to attract customers and outperform your competitors.
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What Are the Steps to Analyze Competitors on Social Media?
As we’ve mentioned, analyzing competitors on social media is central to your product’s success, to outperforming others and to establishing your presence in your target market. But how is this analysis done, and what steps does it involve?
- Identify your competitors
You need to know all of your competitors in your field – and even those likely to appear at any time. If you’re wondering how to predict new competitors, here are some signs that new ones are on the way:
- Your field is one where it’s easy to make a profit.
- There are only a few competitors in the field to begin with.
- The product is in high demand, yet few companies offer it.
- It’s easy to enter the field without significant financial costs.
All of these signal that a new competitor will likely enter your field soon.
- Identify their strengths and weaknesses and gather as much information as possible
This is one of the most important steps in competitor analysis. It reveals where they’re strong and highlights the weaknesses and flaws in their products – which you can avoid or fix in your own product to outperform them.
Specifically, you need to know what drives customers to buy their products. Do they run attractive offers regularly, or give away gifts that encourage people to buy?
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- Identify their target customers
When analyzing a competitor, you need to know who their target customers are and which audience segment they’re trying to attract.
You can do this by identifying the countries and regions they target, their audience’s age and financial and social status, and gender – whether the product targets men, women or both.
- Put all the information to use
The main goal of gathering all this information is to find the right, effective way to build your plan and define a clear approach in the market that ensures your product or service succeeds – reaching a large customer base while retaining your existing customers.
- Use a variety of competitor analysis tools
There are many tools and methods you can use to analyze competitors accurately and learn everything about them – and in turn build your marketing strategy. We cover these in the rest of this article.
One of the most important is analyzing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – known as a SWOT analysis – which also reveals a lot about your target market, including the opportunities and weak spots on competitors’ websites.
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The Top Social Media Competitor Analysis Tools
Here are the 3 most important tools you can rely on to analyze your competitors on social media:
- Sprout Social: This tool shows you the products and services your competitors offer, and gives you detailed information and reports on how their customers rate those services. It also evaluates your own strategies across social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
- Social Blade: This tool is used to track the popularity of YouTube creators, and also provides daily follower count updates. It’s an analytics tool for evaluating major brands and tracking their follower counts across YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.
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The Top Tools for Analyzing Competitor Websites
There are many tools for analyzing competitor websites, but here are the 5 best you can use:
- Ahrefs: a paid tool with a relatively high price, used for search engine optimization – though it offers some free services, such as a backlink checker that detects broken or faulty links.
- Clicky: this tool helps you see your ranking among websites. It’s one of the best-known web analytics tools, giving you detailed information about your live visitors, what they’re doing on your site and when they leave.
- Matomo: a free tool used to measure website traffic and analyze visitor behavior across your entire site.
- Monitor Backlinks: one of the best-known platforms for analyzing website data. It gives you all the metrics on your website’s content and shows how well-optimized it is for search engines.
- ClickTale: provides a comprehensive analysis of visitors and viewers, showing which parts of your website people skip and which parts attract them and hold their attention.
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Content Quality Analysis Tools
- Buzzsumo: identifies the most valuable information for your content and gives you real insight into the best-performing content for your brand.
- Similarweb: a comprehensive tool covering everything related to content and SEO, letting you review your competitors’ content.
- Feedly: this tool’s main job is monitoring competitors’ content. It works as a content aggregator, organizing and storing content as it’s published – including your competitors’ content.
Ultimately, social media competitor analysis is a broad, highly important area for your entire business. Follow our upcoming articles to learn how to achieve the best possible sales through social media.
