Avoid mistakes: this is a big step – monitoring on an ongoing basis your competition will help you notice which campaign or content fails for your competitors and avoid making the same mistakes.
Discover new social media channels
You’re probably posting everyday on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but maybe there is more. What about LinkedIn or Pinterest? If your competitors are using these platforms successfully, this could be a motivation for you and give them a try.
As a business owner, it is essential to figure out what other businesses in your niche are doing on social media, it can help you not just brainstorm ideas for your own social content, but it can also give you an insight into the current habits of the audience your business needs to target. It is the most essential step in defining your overall digital marketing strategy, as it can help avoid making the same mistakes your competition may be making putting you ahead of the game.
Monitoring your competitors is even more critical than just researching them. Carefully monitoring your competitors’ next steps and campaigns can save you time in the long process of growing a business. These findings can shine a light on which type of content your audience is most likely to engage with, encourages the most link clicks, app downloads, likes, etc.
Choose the top 3 to 5 competitors to benchmark your efforts against, gather information about them, including how often they post on Facebook and what their metrics are like.
Here are the key elements to monitor:
Engagement
Engagement is an action someone takes on your Facebook Page or one of your posts, the most common being likes, comments, and shares, but it can also include checking in to your location or tagging your business in a post. These actions matters because they can help extend organic reach. Engagement helps boost your placing in a users news feed by the Facebook algorithm plus likes/shares expose your posts to your audience’s extended network.
Reach
Reach is the number of people that content is seen by on Facebook. This can be by either organic or paid efforts. You can see an overview of the reach by going to your page insights, and if you want more details, you can click on the Reach tab.
Average engagement rate per post: This metric represents the sum of likes, comments and shares on a specific post divided by the number of total posts divided by 100.
Page growth
Although this is largely considered a vanity metric, it shows you how far your content can reach audiences on Facebook, and it helps you create custom audiences for ads campaigns.
There are many tools available that allow you to input this information and produce a report, but as an entrepreneur and small business owner, you may be operating on a limited budget, so for now, tracking the data manually is perfectly suitable and can be achieved by asking these questions…
What type of posts are they publishing?
Figure out the nature of posts they usually share and how is it working well for their brand image.
Which media are they using the most?
What is the ratio of text, photos, videos and links in the content they are sharing on their fan page? If one content format is performing better, take a note of it.
What time do they usually post?
Most brands share content during peak traffic hours. See if that’s the case or they post at regular intervals outside of peak hours.
How frequently are they posting?
Do they share content more than once a day or is it just a few times a week? This tells you how active they are on Facebook.
Which posts receive the most engagement?
It’s not uncommon for digital marketers to run engagement ads on Facebook to “boost” their posts and gather look-alike audiences. This is why it becomes important to check what’s the ratio of their boosted posts vs non-boosted posts and which ones perform better for their audience (and why).
In business it is essential to monitor what other businesses in your niche are doing on social media, it can not only help in compiling your own social media strategy but it can also give you an insight into the current habits of the audience your business needs to target. It is the most essential step in defining your overall digital marketing strategy, as it can help avoid making the same mistakes your competition may be making putting you ahead of the game.
Laura McLoughlin is a Digital PR based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has previous experience as a journalist and website editor. She now works with Omnia, a branding agency with offices in Dubai.
Competition stock photo by Robert Kneschke/Shutterstock
