What exactly is social media benchmarking?

Analysing your rivals’ social media performance across all platforms and comparing it to your own data constitutes a social media benchmarking or competitive study.

To further understand which parts of your social media strategy may be improved, you can do a “social media competitive analysis,” which is just a side-by-side comparison of all of your important indicators and those of your competitors.

Learn your rivals.

Finding out who you’ll be going up against is the first step. You shouldn’t stop at just knowing who they are; instead, you should investigate their utilisation of the most popular platforms.

You’re already familiar with your major rivals, but there might be some more out there worth investigating.

Your rivals’ specialisations in Google search would give you a good idea of where to find them. To begin, go online and do a search using terms related to your industry.

Pick the best five contenders.

Pay attention to competitors who are more successful than you are in some manner.

Use the following methods to locate these formidable rivals:

Select rivals who cater to the same type of purchaser as your ideal customer profile. It aids in honing in on the void in the market.
Examine the services they offer and think about how you may improve upon them.
Pick your company’ size from “small,” “medium,” or “large.” Investigate their market size by looking at their assets, people resources, and client base.
Places where commercial activity takes place. Find out their location if you need to buy something from them physically. Find out if you can compete with your rivals who are selling online and operating their businesses from different locations. These are the kinds of queries that ought to be answered by your social media competitive analysis. You may use this information to plan where to take your company next.
Once you have a list of your rivals, you can use our convenient template to organise them.

Establish concrete objectives for your social media competitive study.

Develop a set of objectives to direct your social media analysis. It’s a great way to focus your competitive examination of social media and end up with useful insights. Listed below are some suggestions for social media objectives:

Strengthen your content marketing plan.

You need to be aware of your successes and failures. Find creative approaches for future advertising efforts.
You should take advantage of the upcoming holiday season to get excellent bargains. Get creative about how you may improve your results and attract more consumers.

Development of your rivals vs your own

How is your progress in expanding your market? Have your rivals outgrown you? Learn the secrets to their continued success. Maintain steady expansion by adopting a digital approach.

How involved is the audience of competing brands on social media?
In order to match or surpass the success of your rivals, you need to increase your audience participation. It is OK if they are significantly more successful than you. Observe how they succeed, and you may do the same.

Learn what makes your audience interested and engaged.
Engaging with your target audience on social media should be a top priority when doing a competition study in this space. To stay ahead of the curve, you need to master the art of audience engagement.

You get to pick the social networking sites.

The top five rivals have been identified. Stumped on what to do next?

Pick the channels that will be under your watchful eye. Consider how your competitors are reaching their target consumers on the various social media channels.

It’s one thing to locate the platforms, but you also need to be aware that your rivals rely heavily on them.

Find out if the people you want to reach are active on these sites, and if so, devise a strategy to increase your visibility there.

There should be a separate section for each social media platform in your competitive analysis template.

Jot down your rivals’ profiles’ names, handles, or usernames, and include any relevant links.

Include the bio description, from which you may glean hashtags and interests using keyword analysis.

Insights gained by text interpretation can be used to inform future social media efforts, provide potential communication phrases, or establish interest topics for paid advertising.

Analysing the Audience

Is your rival increasing their fan base faster than you?

It’s suggested that you pinpoint your exact quantity of supporters. You’ll be more driven to grow your audience and revenue than ever before.

You can easily sum up the totals for each social media site with the help of our competitive analysis template.

Metrics for Content

How often do your rivals post to their social media accounts?

Check out how often they post and what kind of stuff they share.

Using an appropriate mix of photographs, videos, and carousels/albums may have a significant effect on your results.

According to research, there are some post formats, caption styles, and calls to action that perform better than others.

One Last Thing

Becoming a social media marketing expert or turning your business into an overnight sensation does not require a degree in rocket science.

Following this social media competitor analysis template can make the process much simpler.

Spend some time rearranging your social media data, monitoring your progress, and making adjustments as needed.