Why is social network analysis important?
If take a look at the research conducted by CMO Survey, it becomes understood that companies tend to spend more on marketing for social media.
Forecasts show that spendings on marketing in social media will rise from the current 10.5% of total marketing budget up to 18.5% in the next 5 years. Respectively, hundreds of social media marketing services are in use among e-commerce stores and other companies of different size.
As you see, companies over the world already understand the importance of social networks for brand development and increasing sales. Almost 100% of all prominent U.S. businesses adopted the social media marketing strategy. However, only 11% of marketing executives claim they are able to prove the impact of social media marketing on company's revenue. Even though social media monitoring tools make it possible.
For justifying the budget allocated for marketing in social networks, marketers have to prove that the launched campaign meets the company's expectations, while the invested money is paying off. That's called the ROI rate or return on investment in other words.
Studies show that those marketers who relate metrics to results of the business are more likely to reach the set profit goals if compared to the ones who don't. That's why social media data analysis leads to balanced decisions in your social network strategy. Besides, it allows to optimize your expenses by appraising and adjusting the marketing campaign.
Social media competitor analysis
The first step you may take even before launching the company's page on social networks is to analyze your competitors' for defining the benchmarks of the industry. This way, you will have an understanding of their achievements. For instance, you can define the average audience size, number of posts per month, shares per post etc.
Let's consider some steps contributing to successful social media competitor analysis.
Discover your competitors
Be your product a mobile app or an e-commerce store, before competing with anybody on the market you should find out who your opponents are. For some companies, it can be as easy as pie, while with others you may be faced with certain challenges. In any case, you should pay due attention to this step since awareness is a power which puts you in an advantageous position.
Here are several tips on how to do a social media analysis of your competitors:
Google them
Remember that your main free social media analytics tool is Google. The most efficient way to benefit from this search engine is to use keywords or phrases. For instance, 'food delivery NYC', 'best used cars in Miami', 'coffee shops in Manhattan' etc. If your company works worldwide and you seeking for something more global -- use general terms like 'best printing service', 'award-winning design agency' and so on.
Keep an eye on your audience
To discover more about your opponents, you may conduct the social media presence analysis of competitors. Browse their pages in other words. For instance, referring to their pages on Instagram, you can easily learn what brands they follow and single out ones that are similar to your business.
Choose your opponents
As soon as the batch of competitors is selected, you need to choose 3-5 rivals to compete with. Why exactly this much? Because the number of competitors above this can overload you with information and you won't know what to do with all that data. In turn, the lesser number leads to lack of awareness.
