Social media analysis
Monitoring social networks will help you to keep up with the trends in the market – how to arrange posts, what style and what topics to talk with the audience. Make a list of good and bad tricks – with this list it will be easier to work on promoting the company in social networks and avoid mistakes.
Checklist for social media analysis
As an example let’s take a store selling baby strollers, we will analyze one social network – Instagram. The period is 1 month.
Points to check | Our company | www.gracobaby.com | www.summerinfant.com |
Quantity of followers | 4675 | 177 000 | 68 000 |
Post Topics | Advices, life-hack | Advices, life-hack for Mums and kids, promo | Own product advertising |
Popular newsworthy event | Event calendar | Congratulations on children’s holidays | Congratulations on children’s holidays |
Content | Stories about baby strollers, focus is on useful life-hacks, not on sales | Varied content, nice graphics, useful posts, real photos and videos | Boring content, promo without text, few images, a lot of stock photos, a bit of useful content, focus on sales |
Posting frequency | Every day | 1 post per day, sometimes 2 | Every other day |
Daily Engagement Rate (ERday) | 0,012% | 0,015% | 0,011% |
Audience reaction (likes, dislikes, share) | 30 likes (average 3), 10 comments (average 1), average shares 0, total views 3576 | 237 likes (average 6), 22 comments (average 2) average shares 2, total views 74776 | 22 likes (average 2), 1 comments (average 0) average shares 0, total views 2223 |
Message tone | Neutral | On formal terms, emotional communication, often use euphemisms | On formal terms, minimum of emotions |
Response time | 5 min | 5 min | 5-15 min |
YouTube channel analysis
If competitors have YouTube channels, analyze them separately.
Not all brands use this platform, but YouTube is able to drive requests and sales. Analyze the channel in the VidIQ service or on your own.
You can indirectly identify if competitors use paid promotion. Here are 3 signs:
- A big gap in views between videos – all videos have 100 views, and one video scored 500,000.
- Videos with a lot of views, but low engagement -100,000 views, but only 3 likes.
- Only promotional commercials views.
Analyze the competitors’ content on YouTube: what formats they choose, what they post and how often. It is important to determine audience engagement and traffic sources (SEO). To do so, check the video and channel tags, study the quantity of:
- followers
- views
- likes
- dislikes
- comments
- shares
- cues
- screensavers
- videos suggested by the author.
Let’s collect SMM channels in the table and work with data
The table should be as detailed as possible – for each channel, add all the data that you could find. Write notes — for example, that a competitor rarely posts on Facebook or quit TikTok. For our example with companies that sell baby strollers, we chose one parameter – the number of followers. This will help you make minimal conclusions —which channels your competitors are represented in, where they have grown their user base, and what platforms they invest in. The table of channels of the company and competitors will show where our company lags behind competitors, and where it is ahead.
Channels | Followers | ||
| www.gracobaby.com | www.summerinfant.com | Our company |
1 034 492 | 411 943 | 1500 | |
177 000 | 68 000 | 4675 | |
YouTube | – | 3 730 | – |
TikTok | – | – | – |
Then we work with channels. We need to determine:
- what platforms should be strengthened;
- where to stop activity;
- what channels need to be connected.
In our example, it is obvious that we should start TikTok and YouTube. But first, it’s necessary to understand why one competitor abandoned this channel.
Blog and social media posts
The task is to find out how competitors tell about the brand and product. PR and content marketing can drive traffic, requests, sales, but it is important to develop a content plan correctly, carefully choose external sites, and work with opinion leaders.
Check what competitors are doing with the content – what articles they post in the blog, what they talk about on social networks. Content analysis will suggest popular topics as well as help you find free niches
Checklist for auditing texts:
- Topics
- Arrangement
- Communication tone
- Formats: text, video, graphics
- Statistics: views, likes, shares.
Participation in events
Exhibitions, conferences, webinars, lectures, marathons — any offline or online activity helps to promote the brand. Search for activities your competitors are participating in, this will help you to plan events for the year.
- Study the calendars.
Some media have specialized sections dedicated to events. There are also separate aggregators of events for certain industries.
- Monitor competitor social media.
As a rule, companies announce participation in major conferences in their channels. You can also find out if your competitors hold their own events, their formats and regularity.
- Explore the search results for the inquiries “events + industry”, “conference + industry”. So you can make a list of key events for the year. Collect all the events in a table, make notes which of them were attended by your competitors.
PR-strategy
PR is a work with specialized and popular platforms. Each industry has its own list of relevant sites, but there are also universal ones.
Analyze where your competitors are present – where they published the case, what selection of related articles they were included, what Mass media or Blogger had an interview with one of the founders of the company.
Do not blindly go to the sites where competitors are published. However, the list of sites where they are mentioned might be the basis for your own PR.
