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Social Media Competitor Analysis: A 4-step Process
Social media competitor analysis isn’t limited to tracking what makes brands successful on social media — it’s about staying on top of the latest trends, grasping gaps and opportunities, learning from successful steps (and missteps), and refining your own content, care, and targeting strategies. Comparing and benchmarking your social performance against rivals is key to staying ahead of the pack and claiming mindshare.
Think of social media competitors' analysis as your roadmap to becoming a star in the crowded social media space. In this blog, we’ll take you through the basics of social media competitor analysis, key metrics and proven strategies for success.
What is social media competitor analysis?
Social media competitor analysis is the process of assessing your competitors' social media strategies, performance and engagement to identify trends, opportunities and insights that can guide your social media strategy.
Since 91% of American companies (with more than 100 employees) actively use social media for marketing, chances are your competitors are actively using social media for brand awareness, networking or thought leadership.
By tracking key elements of your competitor’s social media, you gain insights into their strategy as well as your common target audience and industry. Some competitor aspects to track on social media include:
- Follower growth trends
- Engagement rates (likes, comments, shares)
- Posting frequency and timing
- Content formats such as videos, images, stories
- Messaging tone
- Hashtag usage
- Audience sentiment
Analyzing competitors on social media can help you find answers to questions like:
- What content types are driving the most engagement for competitors?
- Which social media platforms are our competitors most active on?
- How are competitors engaging with their followers?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors' social media strategies?
- What keywords and hashtags are our competitors using to reach their target audience?
- What’s missing in our social media strategy?
Why perform social media competitor analysis?
Did you know that 53% of customers who follow brands on social media say it's because they are loyal to those brands? Analyzing your competitors’ social media moves is the smart way to find out what they are doing to attract those loyal customers. Additionally, it can help with:
- Spotting emerging market trends
- Understanding your competitors' audience engagement tactics
- Identifying what resonates with your target audience
- Benchmarking your performance in the competitive landscape
- Pinpointing gaps and opportunities in your strategy
- Discovering potential influencers and brands for social media collaboration
“As your brand competes with other brands for customer mindshare on social media, creating quality content will be key to standing out from the competition.” - The State of Social Media Marketing Report, 2024
Which metrics to track during social media competitor analysis?
Metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) in social media competitor analysis can lead to actionable strategies and desired outcomes. Here’s a list of the 10 essential social media metrics you must track for competitor analysis:
Engagement metrics
Engagement metrics measure social media engagement, or the rate users interact with your content via likes, comments, and shares. Besides, here are the other elements you can track when doing competitor analysis on social media:
1. Engagement rate: Refers to the percentage of interactions on your social media posts relative to total followers or views. It can be measured through likes, comments or shares.
2. Share/amplification rate: Measures the frequency of your content being shared by followers or viewers relative to your audience size on social media.
3. Click-through rate (CTR): Refers to the percentage of social media users who click on a link, ad or call-to-action on your posts compared to the total number of people who saw the post.
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Content metrics
Tracking your competitors’ content metrics reveals details about their content strategy, specifically their content mix, post length, frequency and timing, hashtag volume, etc. Here are what to track:
4. Posting frequency and timing: Estimates the posting frequency to track when target audiences are active on different platforms, increase brand reach and maximize engagement.
How often to post on social media: Quick summary
- Instagram: Post 1-2 posts a day
- Facebook: Post about once a day
- LinkedIn: Post between 3 to 5 times per week
- X (formerly Twitter): Post between 2 to 5 times a day
- TikTok: Post about 1 to 4 times a day
Need details? Read How Often to Post on Social Media Platforms
5. Hashtag analysis: Studies how to use hashtags for social media including the most popular hashtags, type, and volume competitors use to boost discoverability and connect with their audiences.
6. Post length analysis: Examines the ideal word count or media duration that works for competitors on different social media platforms to balance audience attention and impact.
Audience metrics
Audience metrics provide insights into the characteristics and behaviors of a competitor's followers and help you understand who their audience is and how they interact with the content. Some to track are:
7. Follower growth rate: It’s the rate at which a brand gains new followers or subscribers on social media. This metric measures a brand's success in attracting new audiences and growing its social media reach.
Not All Followers Are Equal
As the use of bots and automated accounts grows on social media, it's important for businesses to distinguish between genuine follower growth and the artificial increase driven by bot followers. Tracking and understanding this distinction ensures that the growth of followers reflects real engagement, meaningful interest and sustainable long-term relationships with audiences, rather than inflated metrics driven by fake or low-quality accounts.
8. Social media demographics: Refer to the characteristics of a brand’s user base across social platforms including age, gender, location, income, education and interests.
Reach and visibility metrics
Reach and visibility metrics track the number of unique users who see your content and how far it spreads across platforms. Some metrics to look at are:
9. Impressions: It is the total number of times a content piece (post, ad or story) appears or displays regardless of whether it’s clicked or not. Each time the content appears on a user’s social feed, it counts as one impression. One thing to know here is that impressions track every instance the content appears, even if the same user views the content piece multiple times.
Also read: Social Media Reach vs. Impressions
10. Share of voice (SOV): It is the percentage of total brand mentions, engagements or impressions of a brand compared to its competitors. It’s a measure of a brand’s visibility and presence on social media and indicates how dominant or noticeable it is in the market.
Spanish clothing brand Zara was the most mentioned brand on Instagram in 2023 (after Instagram itself). One of the most important tools Zara uses is social listening. It monitors customer conversations around the brand and its competitors, detecting the underlying sentiment and categorizing it as positive, negative and neutral.
You can use social listening too to help scour social media channels for your competitors’ and your own:
- Mentions
- Reviews
- Ratings
This reveals emerging trends, popular themes and customer sentiments that can be leveraged to refine your social media strategy.
Sprinklr’s social listening tool has multiple capabilities like:
- Access to 30+ social and digital channels for real-time conversation-monitoring
- Over 90% accuracy in sentiment detection, entity identification and text classification
- Enterprise-grade listening
- Comprehensive dashboards to benchmark against competition
And so much more! Watch it in action today.
How to conduct a social media competitor analysis
When you undertake competitor analysis in social media, you need a streamlined approach to understand how your competitors leverage social platforms to reach and engage their audience. Here’s a 4-step process for doing it:
1. Find and track your competition
Competitor analysis on social media needs to start with the basics: define who your competition is and what are the parameters you want to compete on. For instance, if you are a global luxury audio brand, then your competition may not be just other audio brands in your home country but across the world. Identify which brands are doing it best on social media — are you impressed with their followership, visuals, post ideas or audience engagement? This will give direction to your own strategy going forward.
Using competitor analysis tools like Sprinklr is a good place to start. You can add, manage and import social media data across 8 social networks. Using this, you can:
- Track customized or standard KPIs
- Follow industry leaders and top voices among competitors
- Identify the best-performing platforms and content
2. Analyze competitor social media strategies
If you want to take a page out of your competitor’s social media playbook, you need an understanding of their strategy. Review your competitors’ social media persona, platform distribution, content mix, social customer care, posting frequency, and successful partnerships, hashtags, and themes for each platform. Also, audit their paid content strategies to analyze what works for them. These become key data points to refine your strategy.
You can use Sprinklr’s AI-powered Smart Content Intelligence to identify what kinds of content get the most reach and engagement. The machine learning models behind this tool can also provide insights on how competition uses promotions or sponsorships to generate revenue. The Smart Content Intelligence dashboard has two options:
- To compare content strategy
- To compare paid strategy
You can also look at which channels your competitors are popular on, which channels they use for paid posts and the media types they use.
3. Benchmark your own social media performance
Here’s where the real deal comes in: compare your own social media performance to that of your competition. Based on the KPIs you identified, benchmark the metrics to competitors and industry standards to get a picture of where you stand. By analyzing your metrics side-by-side with competitors and the broader industry, you can pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses. This will help you identify opportunities to improve your strategy, refine your content approach and ultimately stand out in a crowded digital landscape.
Using two features in Sprinklr’s competitive insights and benchmarking tool — the Industry Average and Competitor Average — you can use relevant KPIs to benchmark against industry standards and competitors.
- Industry Average lets you look at your performance in relation to other brands in your field.
- Competitor Average works off metrics such as engagement and audience growth of brands you want to monitor.
All of these are available on the dashboard widget of the tool that can track up to 8 social channels at once, providing real-time insights into competitor activities, audience sentiments and emerging trends.
What else can you unlock with Sprinklr’s Competitive Insights and Benchmarking?
Sprinklr’s AI-powered competitive insights and benchmarking tools gives you a 360* view of your competition to make data your ammunition in the social media battle. You can:
- Monitor competitors’ social media activity across 8 social channels and 400K+ social profiles
- Set and compare KPIs across competitors with 10+ pre-built dashboards
- Set up smart alerts to monitor real-time changes on social networks
- Automatically generate insightful reports to share with your team
- Measure influencer impact
- Enforce and monitor brand guidelines compliance by influencers
4. Refine your social media plan
Once you have all relevant insights from your social media competitors' analysis and have benchmarked them against your own, refine your social media strategy to get the desired results. Share the insights with the relevant team and individuals so that they can begin working on areas of improvement. Here are some tips on refining your strategy:
● Use a social media analytics tool to collate and organize all the information into accessible formats.
● For maximum effectiveness, integrate all data and insights into your workflows to make faster decisions more effectively.
● Set up smart alerts to get real-time insights on what’s changing with competitors to realign your own strategy.
Ready to analyze the social media competition?
Tracking what your competitors are doing on social media is vital to gauge the pulse of the market and also reframe your strategy in a way that leads to success. It goes beyond simply monitoring social media accounts — you need measurable KPIs to track success, have an air-tight strategy to see results, and be consistent in your approach.
Social media competitor analysis is also not a one-time endeavor. You must conduct this analysis regularly to stay abreast with shifting trends, sentiments and strategies. Stay updated on changes and refine your own social media game regularly to stay ahead of competition.
Leveraging tools like Sprinklr Social and Sprinklr Insights can give you the much-needed edge to monitor conversations across multiple social channels in a single platform, support distributed social teams, never miss a brand mention, look at what competitors are doing from a 360* point of view and get detailed reports that can be used for actionable outcomes. Interested in this for your own brand?
Frequently Asked Questions
To identify social media competitors, track brand-relevant keywords or hashtags and look at who your target audience engages with on the platforms.
Social listening, benchmarking, insights and reporting tools can be useful for social media competitor analysis.
A competitor analysis on social media works best when done at least once a quarter, though you may do so more frequently for better results.
Social media competitive analysis can help you identify trends to capitalize on, the kind of platforms that are popular, the types of posts most interacted with and what’s working for others. You can use this to create content that resonates with your target audience.
- Too much data/ overwhelming volume
- Finding the right competitors
- Shifting audience preferences and market trends
- Changing algorithms
