How to Stalk Your Competitors in Social Media (So You Can Crush Them)

 Alright, I think marketers have jumped on the social media gravy train. eMarketer reported on a study from the Association of National Advertisers showing the growth of social media adoption by US marketers since 2007. When asked back in '07 how many of them were using social media in their marketing, only 20% of marketers raised their hand. Fast forward to today, and a whopping 90% of US marketers claimed social media as part of their marketing strategy in 2012.

That means the medium's over-saturated, and if your social presence isn't awesome now any effort you put in will be too little, too late.

Wait, no, that's decidedly not what it means. Just because these marketers are on social media doesn't mean they're using it well. I know Woody Allen said 80% of success is just showing up, but if everyone's already nailed the showing up part, it's no longer much of a differentiator. Now marketers using social media have to actually, well, use it. And use it well.

So where do you stand in your competitive social media landscape? Have all of your competitors showed up? Have some showed up and done an amazing job? Are some giving it a half-hearted try? Where do you and your competitors fit on the spectrum of crashing, coasting, or crushing it on social media?

If you don't know where you stand, it's hard to identify opportunities to be successful ... and eventually creep up and overtake those competitors of yours! So this post will show you exactly how you can figure out where you stand in the competitive social media landscape. You'll walk away with a quick and simple assessment you can run for your own business, and we'll even show you how to run it using two big brands as an example -- Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts. Are you ready to start the process of crushing your competition on social media? Let's do it.

How to Perform a Social Media Competitive Analysis

To know how much muscle you'll need to put behind your social media marketing, you need to gauge how you stack up against your competitors. Time to perform a social media competitive analysis! First, grab your list of competitors -- ha, like you even have to write them down. Then visit the following social media sites to determine if your competitors have a presence:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest

There may be other social media sites that are important to you -- Google+, Quora, or YouTube, for example. If so, you should certainly perform an audit on those sites, too. But we're going to focus on the sites that we hear marketers worry about the most.

For each social network, you'll want to note a few key pieces of intelligence:

  • Number of fans/followers
  • Frequency of posting
  • What kind of content is published
  • How much content is their own, original content, versus how much is sourced
  • Use of network features
  • Fan/follower engagement

You should also hop off of the specific social media networks, and visit your competitors' homepages and other main pages of their websites -- particularly their blog, resource centers and any other parts of their website that frequently update with new content. What are you looking for? Social media follow and share buttons, which are a good indication of how seriously they take social media marketing. You'll also want to note just how much readers are utilizing those buttons. Are there a few shares? Hundreds? Thousands? Are there more on, say, LinkedIn than Facebook? This is the type of information you need to collect to determine which networks are working best for your competitors.

Notice that these measurements are both quantitative and qualitative in nature. And there are, in fact, other things you can look for on social media pages and profiles to determine whether a presence is strong. That's why we're going to show you how to apply this analysis to a real-life scenarios -- because there are plenty of indicators of a strong social media presence that supersede this more structured framework. You should still, however, revisit these metrics on a monthly basis to see whether both you and your competitors are making progress, stagnating, or falling behind. Remember, social media requires upkeep, and not every brand is cut out to be a social media marketer for the long haul.

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