How to Research Your Competitor’s Social Media Strategy

One area that many businesses struggle with in online marketing is coming up with a social media strategy. Everything from creating social profiles to social content strategy can be daunting. Fortunately, your business doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Chances are, you can gain a good understanding simply by reviewing your competitor’s strategy. In this post, we’re going to look at how you can scope out your competitors and apply their best strategies to your social media campaign.

Selecting Your Competitors
Your first step in competitive social media research is selecting your competitors. You will want to find businesses similar to yours, but not limit your analysis to competitors of a specific size. For example, you may have a small local marketing agency, but you will want to include other small local agencies along with larger ones that offer similar services in your competitive analysis.

Choosing Social Networks
Next, you will need to choose which social networks to analyze. Most businesses will find that they want to start with the main social networks first: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you need to confirm whether a social network will be beneficial to your business, you can answer the following questions.

  • Are your competitors on that particular network? If they are active and have a good following, then you need to be there.
  • Are your target customers on that particular network? You can also create a test advertisement on that social network to see the size of an audience that fits your target customer demographic.

Having the answers to these questions can confirm your need to invest in social media marketing.

Analyzing Competitor Profiles
A great social media campaign starts with solid social profiles and pages. Here are some things you will want to analyze to see how your competitors have set up their social presence.

  • What wording does your competitor use in their Twitter profile bio?
  • What is their Facebook short description (the one on the front of their Facebook page)?
  • What type of pictures do they use on Instagram?

Since you usually have less than 200 characters to describe your business to a first time visitor to your profile or page, you will want it to be great. See what your competitors have to say about their business, particularly noting keywords they include. And regardless of what your competitors do, be sure to squeeze your URL into both descriptions to increase the traffic potential from those networks. Especially on Twitter, as you will only see the URL in your profile in some areas of the site like search results.

Kristi Hines knows what she’s talking about – thanks for your Wisdom!