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Competitive Analysis of Your Industry’s Social Media Use

So your business has started dabbling in social media because you have heard that there is all sorts of opportunity, and you are right.  You have a blog, a Facebook Page and  a Twitter account, which you have been updating, but will admit you don’t have a clear social media strategy to increase business or boost engagement with your audiences.  You figure competitive research will be useful and you are right again! In Part 3 of our Competitive Smackdown Series, we will show  you how to research your competitors’, industry influencers’ and indirect competitors’ social media strategies.

The first thing we need to do for basic social media competitor research is clarify what we are looking for, and then you can be the judge of what you want to include in your social media strategy.  It’s not just about the social media outlets that your direct competitors or industry influencers are using, but also the content that they use to keep people engaged and interested.  Here is a breakdown of what you should be looking for and analyzing:

• Competitors – You know your direct competitors, but we really need to identify who the indirect competitors and industry personalities are in your social media space.
• Channels – Which social media outlets are being used in your industry to communicate and engage – Blogs, YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
• Content – What type of communication or content is effective in getting people engaged?  Is it the articles, news, videos, tips, industry links, deals, promotions, contests, tools, presentations or something else?

Direct Competitors – You know who your direct competitors are in your industry.  Check their website to find where they have a presence in social media and how they are using that presence.  Also search for your competitors directly through the search function in the more commonly used social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare), since a lot of companies fail to properly promote their social media accounts on their website.

Keep a list to compare channel use and content types used in each social media channel.  Identify content trends across competitors. Keep reading for more on content later in this post.

Industry Personalities, Influencers and Indirect Social Media Competitors – You may be in an industry that does not have a lot of direct competitors participating in social media. Or, you may have a strong list of direct competitors that you just prepared. Either way, you will also want to research industry personalities, influencers and indirect competitors, since these will also play a big factor in guiding your social media strategy.

For instance, Home Depot would consider Lowe’s a direct competitor, but Bob Villa would be an industry personality or influencer. It will help Home Depot develop a full and effective social media strategy to analyze both what Lowe’s and Bob Villa are doing in social media. Industry influencers are a great guide to see what type of content your audiences are  responding to.

So how do you find your indirect competitors and industry leaders in social media? Here are a few good social media tools to help you find them and save you some time:

Twitter

• http://www.twellow.com – A yellow pages type search to find most popular profiles on Twitter.
• http://wefollow.com/ – Profiles by tags, basically your competition will be organized and labeled by your core keywords.
• http://refollow.com/ – Ability to find who follows who, a great tool for sniffing out who the lead personalities in an industry are and who they follow.
• http://search.twitter.com/advanced – much better than the typical Twitter search.

Facebook

• Facebook Search – The search functionality of Facebook is sad. So, also try finding the link from a website, a friend on Facebook, a Twitter link, or somewhere else.

Blogs

• http://technorati.com/ -  Probably the best blog search engine.
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ – Google’s own search engine for Blogs, a good tool that could be better.
• http://www.icerocket.com/ – Blog search that can also find related Facebook, Twitter and video content.

Analyzing Content

At this point, you have done your research and have found a lot of great competitors in your social arena.  Now, you really have to sit down and find out what the common and popular content trends are for your industry.

Here are a few good questions to analyze your competitors’ social media content:

• What content is needed to satisfy your audiences and keep them coming back?
• What content is being used to establish authority?
• Are your competitors using presentations, whitepapers and articles effectively?
• What is the tone your successful competitors use to speak with your audience: are they more casual or are they very professional?  It varies through the different social media channels and industries, but the tone successful businesses use in most social media channels tends to be casual.
• How are your competitors getting people to engage: are they running promotions, and if so, what type (contests, polls, social games, personal engagement, controversial topics)?
• Do your competitors use video? is it effective?
• Are they promoting events? How?
• Do they provide links Flickr or other photo galleries?
• Are they blogging? What topics do they blog about?

If you are thinking, proper competitor social media research is going to take some time, you are right again. However, if you need some assistance please don’t forget The Loud Few can help, we are a full service interactive marketing firm in St.Louis that would be excited to help with your social media marketing strategy.

Ongoing Competitive Analysis

Since the internet doesn’t sleep and social media trends are always being created, we need to keep our finger on the pulse.  Leveraging even more social media tools is a great way to do that.

RSS Readers – Subscribe to industry related RSS feeds produced by your indirect and direct competitors, and you can keep up on your competition in one place.

• www.google.com/reader
• http://bloglines.com/

Google Alerts -http://www.google.com/alerts – Setup alerts for activity on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and webpages related to certain search phrases.  Try setting up alerts for popular industry search terms, company names and personalities.  You will also notice options below the main sections of Google search for news, video and the new Google Realtime.

What other ways do you research your competitors’ and influencers’ social media usage? Let me know in the comments.

Related posts:

Competitive Smackdown Part 1: Using Google for Competitive Research

Smackdown Part 2: Your Competitors’ Link Strategy & Indexed Content

Use This Worksheet to Track Your Competitor Research
About the Author

Aaron Stevens is an Internet Marketing Strategist at The Loud Few who specializes in search engine marketing strategy. You can learn more about him here or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/MarmadukeBrew.