Social Media Competitor Analysis

What is a social media competitor analysis and why is it important for your business?

It’s important to know what other companies in your sector are doing, and the aim of a social media competitor analysis is to learn from your competitors and identify any strategic opportunities.

Is a social media competitor analysis essential?

It should be a vital part of your company’s marketing plan. By undertaking a competitor analysis, you can benchmark your business, learn from your competitors’ strengths and take advantage of their weaknesses, establish the level of service that your target audience expects, what they engage with the most and determine a niche to set your company apart.

Investors and key stakeholders will be particularly interested in a competitor analysis; they want to know that you are both realistic about your positioning in the market and thinking strategically about what direction you need to be heading in to future proof your business.  Here is a useful article from Entrepreneur which also gives you an overview and contact us for details of how we can help.

How do you do it?

Firstly, you need to know who your competitors are; a minimum of three competitors should be identified at local level and at least one at national level.

You should then determine where each holds an online presence across the various social media platforms. On each platform, you should note:

• Are there core channels that each competitor is active on?
• How are your competitors using these core channels to meet their goals of sales, brand engagement and customer service?
• What is the frequency of updates? Are they taking a consistent approach, or is it an ad-hoc?
• What content is being used and how?  Do they use a mix of media content?
• What people/companies respond to the most/best?
• Are they creating tailored content for each channel?

Summary

Once you gather this information for each competitor you will be able to identify who are the leaders in each area, what they are doing best, what your target audience responds to the most, what everyone does well and what nobody does well.  Once you have this information, it will allow you to benchmark your social media marketing plan, by creating an easy to understand competitor matrix, rating each area on the above set of criteria. 

To compete in the world of business you must know your competitors!  For more information on the services BizWizUK offers please click here, call us on 0161 826 7181 or email info@bizwizuk.co.uk.

By Ann Davies, Director

Back To Basics

Not every social media platform is right for every business and before you get started, let’s get back to basics, starting with the what, which and who:

What are your company’s goals for using social media?

Are you raising awareness, promoting your products and services, raising awareness of your culture, updates on projects, success stories, or engaging with stakeholders?

Which platforms are we going to prioritise?

Where is your audience/s and what platforms are your competitors using?

Who is going to take ownership?

Who in your company will take ownership for your social media strategy, or will this be a shared role?  Are you going to offer any training to support them, this needs to seamless because mistakes on social media will affect your company’s reputation, and how will you review and evaluate their effectiveness, always testing and measuring success?

Complete a competitor analysis

A competitor analysis in social media marketing is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your current and potential competitors. Your analysis should be able to identify opportunities and threats.  This doesn’t have to complicated, here’s our guide. 

What is your content strategy?

Your content strategy should relate to the planning, development, and management of content, whether this is written, video or other.  Consider the sources of your content, will your content come from reputable sources, will someone within your company write the content, such as blogs, commentary on latest industry news, case studies or success stories, or will it be outsourced?

Get the tools!

If you don’t have the right tools to help you manage your social media strategy, it will become all too overwhelming.  There’s a never ending array of tools, here are some ideas and recommendations for you to try, depending on your budget.

Evaluate

Over time, you will get to understand, what topics your followers like, and the imagery working alongside.  How many enquiries or call-to-actions (CTA’s) did you receive, or which posts had the most engagements?  You can set your company’s own key metrics depending on what you deem suitable. However, it is important to start at the beginning, back to the basics.

Leave it to us!

We pride ourselves on getting to know our clients’ business’, their products, services and audiences, tailoring solutions to suit.

If you’d like advice or to talk through your current social marketing plan and how we can help, whether it’s a training requirement or outsourced solution, please contact us or give me a call on 0161 826 7181 or connect with me on LinkedIn to discuss ways my team and I can support your business.  Alternatively, we have a whole host of complimentary fact sheets to help you on your own social media marketing journey, right here.

By Ann Davies, Director

Your Startup on Social Media

Getting your startup business on social media has never been as important and with 3.48 billion people now use social media, that’s an increase of 9% from last year¹. This means an astonishing 45% of the total world population are using social networks, and that is growing every day.

Check out my 5-step process to help your startup get started.

1. Set S.M.A.R.T Goals – Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.  For example, you may want 50 new followers in 30 days.  Use analytics platforms to track your online activity in real-time, we use and recommend Cyfe.
2. Competitors – Look at your competitors by conducting a competitive analysis that will help you to understand who your competitors are and spot any opportunities, strengths and take advantage of their weaknesses.  This is also a great way to draw on inspiration from other businesses that are great on social media, taking note on the different types of content they publish and how they engage with their audience.
3. Set up Accounts – Determine which platforms you are going to use, looking at those where your target audience lie.  Set up and optimise your accounts, completing all profile fields using your industry specific keywords and any hashtags, use branded images that correctly reflect your new start-up and are correctly sized for each individual platform.
4. Start a Social Media Calendar – Start creating a content schedule that lists the date, time and different types of content for each channel.  Use a social media management platform, which will help you to makes finding, scheduling, managing, and reporting on social media content much easier, we use and recommend Hootsuite.
5. Test, Measure and Test Again – Tracking your activity and data using one of the monitoring tools above will help you to see what works and what doesn’t.  Evaluate and test again until you see what works and what doesn’t.

Summary

Help to improve your startup’s brand loyalty, engage with your audience, and build stronger client relationships by getting on social media. This will set you apart from your competitors by showing your audience how your company is different and reinforcing that your business is the experts in their field.

Should you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch, whether that’s for a bespoke LinkedIn workshop for you or your team, a face to face or a remote-based one to one workshop or ongoing, outsourced social media marketing support.

¹ Hootsuite

2019 Social Media Strategy

As we approach the end of the year and prepare for Christmas, we are also looking forward to the start of a brand new year. In this fast paced environment of social media marketing we can already predict many of the changes and trends that are likely to take place in 2019.  With this in mind, it is important that you start to look at your 2019 social media strategy to ensure that you are ahead of the game. Some elements to consider are:

Keeping up with social media

Big changes coming to Facebook’s messaging platform

As of the 1^st January 2019, Facebook Pages will need to be successfully approved for subscription messaging permissions if not, they won’t be able to send the free messaging type called ‘non-promotional subscription messaging’.

If you’re a Page admin you need to read this.

The type of content you upload

As above, the battle to be seen amongst the vast array of competitor content means that you have to make your own content stand out. Careful consideration should be given to the sort of content you’re posting and its relevance. Your content should be a rich mixture of video, live streaming and info graphics. Text heavy updates will simply not be enough when it comes to your social media strategy!

Taking advantage of new platform features such as Facebook ‘Watch Party’

It’s official!  Facebook Watch Party has been officially launched!  It’s a new feature for groups that allows admins to hold a live screening of pre-recorded videos that are publicly available on Facebook. Group members can watch and comment on the videos at the same time to create a shared viewing experience.

Changing demographics

When considering your marketing plan you should take into account who your target audience is.  Think about the varying understanding of technology, contact preferences and tome of voice that might best appeal to each demographic.  For example, graduates, teenage consumers and the ageing population means people of an older age that might not have been targeted previously should now be included in any marketing strategy.

Deciding which platform serves what purpose and how you can take full advantage

So, we now know that Facebook is looking more towards video as I have mentioned above, and LinkedIn has launched changes to Company pages so where does Twitter fit in?  Twitter has announced a relatively small, but significant update, which now means that advertisers using the platform’s in-stream video ads will be able to reach a global audience with their ad content, as opposed to being region-restricted.  Twitter has also announced a new update to its ‘Explore’ section which splits the latest news into sections, helping to improve relevant content discovery.  Twitter is more associated to real-time content, so it might prove more beneficial to users who are looking to keep up with the latest news and events.

I hope my latest blog has given you some ideas for your 2019 social media strategy?  Make sure you’re ahead of the game by using the above points to help inform your strategy or you can sign up to our monthly newsletter here.

Should you need any further assistance don’t hesitate to get in touch and my team and I can help draft a bespoke plan that will ensure your brand is on top in 2019.

By Ann Davies, Director