What is Social Competitive Analysis?
What Does a Social Competitor Analysis Look Like?
There are a variety of social listening tools that make competitive analysis much easier. When your competitors have a new ad campaign running, you can see exactly how consumers are responding and where their sentiment falls.
Understanding what your competitors’ audiences love – and why – means you can offer the same thing, even if you never thought to before. Understanding competitor audience dissatisfaction gives you the chance to fill a need and gain new loyal customers.
3 Things you Need to Know
- Social Competitive Analysis is about identifying and analyzing you competitors and how they are performing on social media.
- The most important metrics to focus on are demographics, psychographics and customer sentiment insights.
- Natural language processing (NLP) is key to obtaining accurate customer sentiment.
FAST FACTS
- Adweek provides a great source for how to do a social competitive analysis on Twitter.
- Top of the line Social Competitor Analysis solutions deliver impactful insights or you can do it more simply with a variety of free tools.
- The Forrester Social Media blog is a great source of information and thought leadership.
First Steps to Social Competitive Analysis
- Consider a Range of Competitors: Consider a wide range of competitors including established competitors, new entrants, and potential challengers within your category that may enter the market using Social Media Listening.
- Compare Apples to Apples: Maintain competitive topic definitions similar to brand topics to accurately benchmark share of voice, Net Sentiment, and Brand Passion KPIs.
- Segment Conversations for Deeper Insights: Use theme analysis to identify differences in volume and sentiment across sub-segments of the conversations – by competitor, operational segment, product feature, etc.
- Perform Ongoing Analysis: Extend ad-hoc competitive benchmarking as an ongoing analysis to identify trends and deviations to benchmarking metrics.
- Act upon Competitive Insights: Correlate KPIs to operational metrics (revenue, NPS, Survey data, etc.) and decide to improve processes, change spend, change resources, or develop new ideas to grow market share.
Best Practices for Social Competitive Analysis:
- Understand which metrics matter – demographics, psychographics, and sentiment are more important than superficial metrics like mentions, likes, retweets, etc.
- Decide who merits your attention is analyzing sentiment, so you know which topics have the most passionate audience – those are the ones worth your time.
- Compare social content across platforms – look beyond the platforms you use to see where consumers are interacting with your competitors.
- For more information, check out our guide to conducting a social media competitive analysis.
Social Competitive Analysis
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