Let’s talk about how and why to analyze competitors on social media: where to find them, what to look for, and which tools to use. Most importantly, we’ll discuss how to use the gathered information to improve your own social media presence.
Welcome to ZAYATS, the first digital consulting agency in the USA specializing in digital transformation, founded by a woman.
Competitor analysis is a crucial step in creating your strategy. It helps us understand what already works and what isn’t worth your time. We adopt effective tactics and discard the ones that don’t deliver results.
Why do it?
Competitor analysis helps us achieve brand performance goals. From a performance standpoint, it identifies effective strategies and funnels. From a branding perspective, it helps us understand how to position ourselves and attract our audience’s attention. We also strive to identify and meet hidden needs that competitors haven’t addressed yet, carving out our own niche.
By doing this, we avoid blind promotion and use our insights to develop hypotheses. This approach allows us to quickly establish a stable sales channel and differentiate ourselves from competitors through effective branding.
In a relatively short period, you will be able to build a comprehensive competitor analysis system. In this article, I will delve into this topic further. We’ll start by discussing the principles of selecting competitors, and then we’ll move on to analyzing their pages.
Let’s get started…
What do you need to start competitor analysis?
First, you need to understand your goals for social media promotion. How do you determine these goals? Everyone’s goals are different, but start by answering this simple question: What is the purpose of SMM for your brand? Is it to sell, strengthen brand positions, increase audience loyalty, or something else? Maybe it’s all of these things. Your answer will determine the focus of your audience analysis and your next steps.
Here are a few examples of how the goal of promotion influences the mechanics of competitor analysis:
How to Select Competitors for Analysis?
To effectively analyze competitors on social media, focus on those with a strong SMM (social media marketing) presence. Look for active pages that engage with their audience. If your company has a strong direct competitor that doesn’t pay much attention to social media, exclude them from your analysis.
Purpose of SMM Analysis
The goal of SMM analysis is to study competitors who excel in social media. Always concentrate on the strongest players, while keeping your promotional goals in mind.
Focus Areas Based on Goals
1. Community Building
If your focus is on creating a community, look for pages with a strong, loyal core audience. You can identify these by:
- The level of activity under their posts, such as comments, likes, and shares.
- User-generated content (UGC), where followers create posts related to the brand.
2. Sales and Marketing
If your goal is sales, target pages with active content and advertising. High engagement is not always necessary, but consistent promotional content and ads are key indicators.
I suggest analyzing 5–10 pages as follows:
- 4–5 Direct Competitors: These should be businesses that are comparable to yours in terms of budgets and goals.
- 2–3 Direct Competitors with Larger Budgets: Look at companies that have larger budgets to understand how they leverage their resources.
- 2–3 Indirect Competitors: Focus on businesses that are very active on social media, even if they aren’t direct competitors.
- 2–3 Adjacent Competitors: If your niche is very specialized and there are few direct or indirect competitors, consider looking at related industries.
Where to Find Competitors?
You probably already know your direct competitors. However, don’t limit yourself to just this list, as your main business competitors might not always excel on social media. I recommend specifically looking for competitors who are great at social media marketing with high audience engagement — these are the ones you should study.
In narrow and complex niches, such as science or manufacturing, these methods might not work, and alternative approaches are needed.
For example, for offline businesses, it’s important to identify competitors who have locations in the same region or close to yours. You can search for such competitors on maps, select those nearby, and find links to their social media profiles on their business listings.
Another example is specialized products. To find competitors, you can use online stores where you can search for key manufacturers and suppliers by the product name. Then, use a search engine to find companies that work with them.
Once you have selected 5–10 competitors, you need to proceed to a detailed analysis of their pages.
There are four main areas to examine:
- Content Marketing
- Advertising and Influencer Marketing
- Sales Funnels
- Communication Strategy
How to Analyze Competitors’ Content Marketing?
Analyzing content helps you understand what resonates with the audience: what they comment on and like the most, which posts get shared, and which ones receive the most attention.
This information will form the basis of your content strategy and help you engage with your audience rather than just broadcasting messages. You’ll move away from simply posting content without knowing if it appeals to your followers or meets your business objectives.
When analyzing, focus on the content objectively — consider what the audience likes, not just your personal preferences. Look at metrics like reach, reactions, and views. Remember, likes, views, and followers can sometimes be inflated or fake.
What to Look for When Analyzing Content
Start by identifying popular posts — various tools like Livedune can help with this. These services can collect posts over a specific period and rank them, allowing you to find the top-performing content and understand what resonates with the audience.
Next, move on to a detailed analysis of the content funnel. I recommend adapting the AARRR framework, which helps you understand how competitors attract, engage, and convert their audience. This framework covers:
- Acquisition: How do competitors attract visitors?
- Activation: How do they engage their audience?
- Retention: What strategies do they use to keep their audience coming back?
- Revenue: How do they monetize their audience?
- Referral: How do they encourage their audience to refer others?
If you need to build a sales channel, review the entire funnel and understand the sales mechanics. When focusing on customer loyalty, pay more attention to the stages of activation, retention, and referrals. In terms of branding, pay close attention to visuals and communication formats, focusing on how brand values are conveyed and the brand image is formed. More details on this can be found in the communication strategy analysis section.
How to Attract an Audience?
There are two main methods: attracting them to a community or an email subscription. Study both mechanisms.
If there is an email subscription, subscribe to it and review the content: what the emails are about, whether they are standalone or part of a series, and whether there is a chatbot. If a chatbot is present, understand its functions.
Analyzing emails and chatbots is likely the most time-consuming part.
You should also evaluate the social media page design, as it must capture new audiences and lead them to take the desired action:
- What is on the cover photo and avatar?
- What is in the pinned post?
- What is in the menu, widgets, and discussions?
- Is there a consistent style in the publications?
How to Retain and Activate an Audience?
Engaging publications include useful, reputation-building, and interactive content such as tips, reviews, Q&A, interesting information, games, quizzes, polls, and more. These are designed to motivate people to stay subscribed and engage with the content.
The goal of such content is to generate demand, address objections, and foster engagement. Pay attention to post topics, the number of reactions, and views. If a post is meant to drive engagement, see if it offers additional incentives, like a reward for solving a puzzle.
Analyzing emails, stories, and live streams requires patience. Monitor the page for at least a week to identify recurring strategies, offers, and promotions that competitors emphasize.
Sometimes, competitors might not have such content. For example, when we created our own ZAYATS social media account, none of our competitors had posts aimed at activation and retention. So, we had to develop formats from scratch that could potentially attract a new audience. Moreover, we took a different approach. We observed how uninteresting our competitors’ social media were and set a goal to be more engaging, better, and even funnier. That’s why on Instagram, we publish videos that resonate with our customers, and on LinkedIn, we share useful articles and guides.
How to Sell through Content?
Selling content includes product reviews, themed selections, testimonials, promotions, discounts, and special offers. Sales posts target warm and hot audiences ready to make a purchase.
When analyzing these posts, look at offers, CTAs, and reach. Also, note the reactions, but they shouldn’t be the main criteria, as the goal of these posts is to sell, not to engage.
How to Encourage Recommendations?
This type of content includes invitations to leave a review, invite friends, and UGC (user-generated content) posts.
High-quality engaging and retention content can build a loyal core audience and an active community. Thus, followers often write reviews and testimonials about products or services without additional incentives like gifts.
However, not all brands use recommendation mechanisms, so such posts might not exist. Try searching manually: scroll through feeds or search by keywords like “review” or “recommend.”
The analysis should result in an understanding of the content funnel:
- How and where followers are attracted
- How new audiences are activated and retained
- How sales are made and where purchases are directed
- How followers are motivated to leave reviews and recommend to friends
How to Analyze Competitors’ Advertising?
Analyzing ads is more challenging because you don’t have access to key statistics such as clicks, costs, and conversions. Therefore, you can only gauge the effectiveness of certain ads and funnels through indirect signs.
Ads are more often used to boost sales and less frequently for branding. In the former case, the primary goal of the ads is to attract an audience and motivate purchases. In the latter, the goal is to reach as many people as possible to introduce or remind them of the brand.
Analyzing Competitors’ Ads through Services
There are services available to find ads that were run on social media or other channels. You can find many of these by searching on Google.
These services help identify ad campaigns, track funnels, and find key offers, and common creative formats. This can be a starting point for developing your own advertising strategy and differentiating yourself from competitors.
However, blindly copying competitors’ strategies won’t work. You need to create your own solution based on competitors, test, and analyze their effectiveness. What works for them might not work for you.
For instance, in one of my projects, I noticed a competitor heavily using email marketing. I decided to test email campaigns as well. Initially, they produced good results, but the data later showed that direct sales worked better. Consequently, I eventually phased out the email campaigns.
Understanding Competitor Strategies
It’s important to recognize that if all your competitors are using discounts, you might need to do the same. If they attract customers with free trials, you’ll likely need to offer them too.
Analyzing Competitors’ Influencer Marketing
You should specifically look for ads in other people’s blogs to understand how competitors attract audiences through influencer marketing. This is particularly relevant for social media platforms without targeted advertising options. If you work in a field like science, where direct competitors don’t use social media at all, study indirect competitors with strong social media marketing strategies.
You can evaluate the effectiveness of influencer placements using the CVR (Conversion Rate) metric, calculated as:
Keep in mind that the increase in followers from a giveaway will always be higher than from a post with a unique selling proposition (USP), so comparing these two types directly is not accurate.
Sometimes, analysis shows that competitors only use one social network for influencer marketing. This doesn’t mean that influencers are only effective on that platform. It’s more likely that no one is engaging with audiences on other platforms, giving you an opportunity to be the first. You just need to choose the right format and offer.
Case Study Analysis
When looking for case studies, don’t limit yourself to direct competitors; indirect and related cases can also be valuable.
For example, a B2B project selling wholesale flowers could benefit from B2B case studies in different industries with similar promotional goals, such as professional cosmetics or food products. These case studies might reveal effective funnels and offers that could be adapted for selling flowers.
To make analysis easier, compile all your findings into a table:
- Link to Competitor or Case Study
- Funnels
- Offers
- Audience Segments
- Link to Landing Page
- Creative Content for Different Audiences
Also, note any specific details that don’t fit into the above categories. For example, you might discover from a case study that the product isn’t bought directly and that longer funnels with email nurturing perform better.
Competitor Funnel Analysis
After examining each component separately, you need to understand the overall picture — what funnels competitors are using. Look at where they direct their followers from social media or ads: to their website, app, or direct messages.
Pay special attention to how content, advertising, and email marketing interact.
It’s possible there’s minimal interaction — this is quite common. It often means that target marketers are working independently of content managers, which significantly lowers the quality of promotion.
This approach will help you identify content and advertising strategies that your competitors haven’t explored yet.
For example, while analyzing social media marketing (SMM) in the food delivery niche, I noticed that most businesses were using the same tactics, making restaurants seem indistinguishable from each other. We needed to expand into several new cities, so we decided to implement a unique strategy — engaging users through a gamified email marketing campaign. This resulted in increased sales, engagement, and brand recognition, activating existing subscribers and attracting a new audience unfamiliar with our brand.
A comprehensive analysis should help you understand:
- The funnels competitors use
- How they engage with their audience
- Their advertising and seeding tactics
- How they warm up their content
- The offers they use to attract and retain customers
Analysis of Communication Strategy
At this stage, you need to examine how competitors communicate with their audience. This will help you differentiate your brand and identify key communication patterns. Most communication messages are conveyed through content and visuals.
The communication strategy is closely linked to the content strategy and directly impacts the style of your social media presence.
For example, when analyzing competitors of an artist from California, we noticed that few in the niche create engaging content. Most stick to posts like “here’s my painting” or “here I am painting,” or “before/after” shots. When there is expert content, artists tend to write in a “philosophical high art” style, which often isn’t easily understood.
We realized this was an opportunity to stand out, so we focused on expert content with an artistic theme. The key feature was close interaction with the audience — we collect questions from followers about artists or paintings they are curious about and then create short, informative video stories on these topics.
We maintain the client’s communication style, slightly adapting it for social media formats. While many artist bloggers simply post time-lapse videos of themselves painting, our client, an artist from Santa Barbara, uses engaging videos to discuss interesting topics, attracting a new target audience. This audience is generally interested in art, not just the process of creating it.
This approach helps us create the desired image: Lera is primarily an artist, not just a blogger. She shares interesting facts about art in a clear and accessible way. Lera is an artist who understands not only her own work but also the technical details of art. She doesn’t dwell on philosophy but instead analyzes cases, explains styles, and educates people who are genuinely interested in art.
Moreover, this format ensures consistency in personal interactions with the artist. People get used to her way of speaking and her style on social media, and they expect the same in-person. If the social media style differs from real-life communication, it creates the impression that one person is managing the page while another is creating the art, which destroys trust.
That’s why I personally manage our ZAYATS Instagram. I understand that my accent might reduce viewership, but it allows me to be honest with my audience and filter out unnecessary clients. If a client needs me to be American to work with me, they are not my client.
Comparing Metrics with Competitors
Analyzing key metrics will help you assess your own effectiveness, measure competitiveness, or establish a KPI system. Any social media analytics platform can be used for this analysis.
Here are the key parameters to evaluate first:
- Total number of likes and shares over a period
- Audience engagement rate (ER)
Compare these metrics to understand where your competitors outperform you. This ongoing comparison will help you gauge the effectiveness of your SMM efforts.
On average, it’s possible to double your social media metrics with a year of active work. The right content can increase your reach fourfold — views within the same timeframe. This will enable you to finally attract clients through social media and build your community.
How to Formulate Conclusions
After conducting all the analytical work, the final step is to draw conclusions. Create a document, spreadsheet, presentation, or mind map with information about the key players in the market and their strategies.
Comprehensive Social Media Competitor Analysis
Using this approach, we conduct a thorough analysis of competitors on social media. This ensures that our clients’ social media accounts are active, engaging, and attract users who are likely to purchase their products.
Our method helps identify the best starting points for promotion, saving time by avoiding ineffective hypotheses. This approach sets us apart from typical marketing agencies that lack analytical skills and fill social media with generic posts like “Good morning” or “Sunset in Santa Barbara,” which fail to engage audiences.
If you want your social media to work effectively, you need a consulting digital agency, not just a marketing agency that manages social media. There’s a big difference. We leverage competitors’ experiences to quickly achieve KPI targets and continuously find new strategies to improve results and address various goals: increasing brand awareness, branding, building a loyal core audience, and more. Traditional marketing agencies managing social media lack this capability, rendering their services ineffective.
Did you think we were just here to make kitten videos?
You can download our presentation on “How to Analyze Competitors” and try conducting your own analysis. But if you need a comprehensive approach to social media, reach out to us. We know how to build sales channels and strengthen brand positions.
