HOW TO ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS USING SOCIAL DATA

If your business is taking social media seriously, you will have noticed that social media is gradually getting harder to succeed at.  This is a natural progression of the channel, and the changes made by the platforms are largely to be expected.  Take Facebook for instance.  They have little choice but to reduce NewsFeed reach algorithmically for certain types of posts as there is only limited space, and the volume of content being produced by users and pages is constantly growing.

With this in mind, the need to get ahead of your competitors and leverage every impression your content receives is key.  To do this, we recommend analyzing your competitors’ efforts and comparing key performance metrics to your own.  By understanding their performance in detail, you can optimize your plans for success.

The first step is to decide who you’re classing as your competitors – this may not be as obvious as you think.  With social media platforms, your competitors should be classed as any of the following (with the more you can track the better):

• Your direct, traditional competitors
• Those competing for the attention of a similar audience to you, even if in a different sector
• Businesses with a similar content strategy, albeit for a different audience

Valuable insights can be gained from all three categories, although naturally you want to beat your traditional competitors the most!  Those that are competing for the attention of the same audience as you are also very important, so ensure you track at least one of these.

Once you’re happy with your competitor set, it’s time to start pulling out some data.  The key data we’re after here varies by channel, with Facebook & Twitter currently holding the best competitive data.

Facebook Data

On Facebook the first metric to track is the ultimate vanity metric, but tracking the size of your Facebook page over time versus competitors allows you to see growth rates.  This may be influenced by advertising and offline campaigns, but is worth monitoring as a judge of overall performance.  You can measure your page size growth easily in Facebook Insights, but to measure others comparatively you will need to use a paid analytics tool.

Beyond page size, the data available on Facebook on competitors starts to become more interesting.  The key metrics to analyze in terms of your competitors is engagement rate, broken down by a variety of factors.  For instance, comparing engagement rates by days, time of post, by content type and content topic allows you to really start learning.  Some of this data can be pulled from Facebook Insights, whereas some needs to come from paid analytics tools.

There are a number of paid tools available on top of Facebook Insights to help you extract all of the data you need.  Use tools like Socialbakers, & Optimal Social, as well as proprietary data mining tools to get this data out in an efficient way.

Examples of the kinds of data you can see, and how to present it to gain the best insight are below:

 

As you can see from these graphs, comparing the volume of posts on a topic and the average engagement of these posts gives you an indication of strong and poor performance.  By doing this for your page and your competitors pages you can get strong indications of where to amend your content in the future.

Twitter Data

On Twitter, you need to keep a track of your competitors overall following, their daily mentions, and their Tweet engagement rate.  Twitter’s analytics platform is still fairly new, and doesn’t give much to compare to competitors as of yet, but there are plenty of free and paid Twitter tools to help you out, such as Topsy, Twitonomy, and Twitalyzer.

 

Tracking daily mentions, following and average engagement rate at a top line level allows you to analyze on which days you are performing better or worse than your competitors.  This allows you to step back and see what content was posted on those days by you and your competitors, to see how you did well, or where you can improve based on what your competitors activity was.

The same can be said for any other social media platform where any public data is available.  Generally speaking the other social media platforms are not as developed analytically, but if you are prepared to put in a little manual effort to calculate your engagement rates and that of competitors then you can follow the above techniques to compare engagement rates by various factors across different companies.

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4 Tools That Improve Your Social Media Analytics

#1: Receive Automatic Reports Daily Via Email With Social Report

The one thing we check every day is our email. So it makes sense to get social analytics and updates automatically delivered to your inbox.

Social Report is a comprehensive analytics tool with a very affordable starter account that lets you to monitor up to five projects, each with an unlimited number of social accounts for only $9 per month.

Once your account is created, you can set up your first project. Under your project dashboard, click on the Add Social Media Accounts option to start connecting all of your social media accounts and other important business accounts.

Account options you can choose for your Social Report profile.

Social Report connects to all of the major social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare and many others. You can also add any individual groups you own on Facebook and LinkedIn, your Google Analytics and online stores.

Once you’re set up, you can access lots of graphs to analyze audience growth, engagement, reach and activity. You can also find demographic details about your social audience on each social network you’ve connected.

Demographic information about your social media audience.

What you’ll really love about this tool is that you can get a daily digest summarizing the most important activity from each of your connected accounts (pages, profiles and groups) via email.

You can learn more about members of your LinkedIn group.

LinkedIn group insights from a Social Report email.

Get a quick summary of your audience and activity on Twitter followed by a list of your tweets, mentions, direct messages and new follower details.

Twitter profile insights from a Social Report email.

Get a list of new activity on your Facebook page, a summary of your fans, page views and referrer URLs leading traffic to your page.

Facebook page insights from a Social Report email.

Social Report’s daily digests keep you up to date about most—if not all—of your social media activity, without you leaving your inbox!

#2: Share Analytic Reports With Stakeholders Via Cyfe

Like dashboards? Then you’ll love Cyfe. You can create an unlimited number of dashboards with an unlimited number of widgets for only $19 per month.

Once you’ve created your account, set up your first dashboard.

Create a new dashboard on Cyfe.

Inside your new dashboard, you’ll add widgets to track your social accounts. The following are available for social media.

Add a variety of social media widgets in your Cyfe dashboard.

There are also widgets for Twitter, Twitter search and YouTube.

Depending on the network you choose, you’ll be able to create widgets to display your audience size, activity and keyword searches.

Configure your social media widget.

You can also create dashboards and widgets for many other platforms includingGoogle Analytics and AdWords, WordPress, AWeber, FreshBooks, PayPal and Moz.

View your social media activity in dashboards with Cyfe.

In addition to being able to quickly see the most important information about your social accounts, you can create reports based on your dashboards. Cyfe sends the reports to you at your preferred frequency.

Create reports for yourself, your boss and your clients.

Keep everyone up to date on the status of your social media marketing with dashboard data emailed to you, your boss and your clients.

#3: Establish ROI With SumAll

Want to connect your social media activity to other areas of your business?SumAll can help you do that. First, you’ll need to sign up for your free trial. Then you can start connecting to your social networks.

Choose platforms to connect within your SumAll account.

To get the most out of your SumAll account, be sure to connect to other platforms such as Google Analytics, Constant Contact, Amazon Payments, eBay and Shopify. This helps you visualize how your activity on social media affects other areas of your business and your bottom line.

Once your data has loaded, you can add various streams of data to your chart by selecting them from the library on the left side.

Select platforms from the SumAll library menu.

As you add different data points, they’ll appear on the chart. This allows you toanalyze how your activity on one platform affects the activity on another.

For example, chart your Twitter activity and PayPal transactions to see if an increase in tweets leads to an increase in income.

Compare social activity with other important business data.

Now, you can find out if an increase in Instagram posts leads to more Facebook engagement, or if an increase in followers on Twitter leads to an increase in sales on Shopify. The potential to find social media ROI is limitless.

#4: Explore Social Audience Demographics With Google Analytics

Last but not least is Google Analytics. Goals help you link your social media activity to conversions on your website.

The easiest way to get social media data from Google Analytics is by using the standard social media report under Traffic Sources > Social.

Learn more about your social media activity in the social media overview.

Here, you learn more about the website traffic you receive from top social networks. Note that this only covers popular networks—Google Analytics doesn’t officially categorize a lot of smaller niche networks as part of their equation.

Under the Conversions section of the social reporting area, you can find out which social networks have led to the most conversions, including the value of those conversions if you set up values in your goals.

See which social networks drive visitors who convert the most.

Alternatively, if you’d like to view all of your Google Analytics data based on traffic from social networks, you can create a Custom Segment. To do this, click on Advanced Segments and then + New Custom Segment.

Click the + New Custom Segment button to start a new custom segment.

Name your custom segment and start adding the domains for each social media network you want to analyze. Each line should say Including > Source > Containing > domain.com. You can add up to 20 sources total.

Creating a custom segment in Google Analytics.

Save your custom segment and you can view everything in your website’s Google Analytics data based on traffic from the social media networks you specified.

Custom segments can show you the top content consumed by your social media referrals, how many social media website visitors come from mobile devices, what countries your social media website visitors live in and other specific insights that will help you do better online business.

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Amazing Social Media Statistics From Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest And Google+ [INFOGRAPHIC]

Would you like to become a social media marketer? You know, so you can actually use Twitter and Facebook – proactively – at work?

Sure you would. But you have to memorise a few key stats, first. For example, did you know that the U.S. is the top country on Twitter, and that 34 percent of marketers have generated leads using the micro-blogging social network?

You’ll need to know that Pinterest reached 10 million U.S. monthly visitors faster than any other independent site in history, that almost half (48 percent) of Fortune Global 100 companies are on Google+ and that 85 percent of SMBs with a dedicated social media platform reported an increase in their overall market exposure.

This infographic takes a closer look at some key facts and figures from the world of social media.

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