Social Media Competitor Analysis Tools

In an ever more competitive social media environment, understanding what your competitors are doing, and what is working for them, is extremely important. Many businesses and influencers are aware of this fact. The real question relates to what is required in order to analyze the social media performance of your competitors effectively.

There is more to competitive analysis in social media than simply comparing basic metrics. In fact, competitor analysis can give you the opportunity to gain valuable insights from studying your competitors’ profiles that help you understand where your profiles stand in relation to the best in your industry, as well as tips as to what you can do to boost your performance.

Features of the Best Social Media Competitor Analysis Tools

When discussing the features and functions of competitor analysis tools for social media, we should first explain what competitor analysis consists of. In reality, there are three main areas that relate to the competitive analysis process. These include:

Researching who your Competitors Are
Comparing and Benchmarking your Profiles with your Competitors
Finding out What Content is Performing Well and Why

There are, of course, different components of competitor analysis to keep in mind that range from benchmarking profiles across networks to studying the performance of individual posts. Throughout our overview of competitor analysis, we will explain what features your tool needs to have and why.

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Discovery and Research

It may sound simple, but identifying who your competitors truly are is a crucial step in the competitor analysis process. Do you know all the competitors in your industry? Is there some tool that can help you search for profiles posting content similar to yours in your target market?

This is why competitor analysis tools for social media should have some form of research and discovery function so you can efficiently find all the relevant voices in your industry or area. In reality, competitor analysis tools for social media should help you keep up to date on profiles that are posting content relevant to the topics you care about.

The ability to find relevant profiles is an important feature that actually has an effect on the other features we will discuss below. This is because benchmarking and content analysis are more meaningful if you add more data points from your competitors’ profile. So, if you have a social media competitor analysis tool that allows you to track unlimited profiles across networks, then you can add dozens or hundreds of profiles to your analysis.

Advanced Benchmarking

Social media competitor analysis tools are first and foremost designed for conducting benchmarking analyses. A benchmarking analysis focuses on how various social media profiles compare to each other across different platforms. This comparison can be done for profiles of the same network or for profiles on different networks.

In conducting a benchmarking analysis, you need to decide on what metrics you are tracking. It is important that you think about why you want to track each metric and, ultimately, what you want to find out by tracking a certain metric. You will most likely want to look at a variety of metrics so you can get a good overall picture of where you stand from a number of different standpoints. Therefore, when doing a competitor analysis, your social media analytics software should offer a wide range of metrics that you can track and analyze.

You may think that benchmarking may revolve around analyzing only a few profiles. However, as we already mentioned above, the reality is that the best social media competitor analysis tools would allow you to track hundreds or even an unlimited number of profiles. This is because being able to have a large data set can help ensure for accurate benchmarking and goal setting, since you have many data points in your analysis.

Content Insights

When talking about the best social media competitor analysis tools, the content optimization insights they provide really set some tools apart from others. In terms of content insights, we will talk about some of the most important features that social media competitive analysis tools should offer.

One of the most important features revolves around is being able to look at the most successful posts of the profiles you are tracking according to various metrics. There are most likely thousands of posts in a given timeframe you are looking at for all the profiles you are researching, so having the ability to filter through posts is essential. The best social media competitor analysis tools would give you numerous options for various metrics to track, as well as various charts, graphs and tables to study the data output.

There are many other types of analysis you can do with content insights offered by social media competitor analysis tools. One of the most important is researching the best times to post across difference social media networks. As many are already aware of, posting at the right time can help improve the reach of your content. There are things to keep in mind when it comes to finding the best time to post, such as the timeframe you want to study as well as adding the right profiles to add to your data set. While most competitor analysis tools for social media will have some version of this feature, make sure that you can add enough profiles to your analysis so that your dataset is meaningful. We have covered how to find the best times to post across many different social media networks, such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, so feel free to read those for more information.

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You may also be interested in researching what type of content is performing the best. This can either be done by looking at what content formats are most successful (i.e. carousels, stories, etc.) or if a specific type of content is performing well. The latter can be simply done by creating a chart or graph and specifying what metric you want to study in relation to a certain post type. The former can be done with a tagging analysis, which helps you create your own category tags that you then apply to specific posts. We go into detail about how to use a tagging analysis for content optimization purposes in another article.

One last feature we should mention here relates to hashtag research. We cover this topic in-depth as it relates to different networks such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter elsewhere. However, knowing what hashtags are trending and which ones typically have the highest post interaction rates can be a valuable addition in optimizing your own posts. These types of advanced analytical features can be a real help for your overall content planning.

Of course, there are many other features that social media competitor analysis tools can and should offer. What is important to keep in mind here is that you go into your search knowing generally what types of features you need. If you want to learn more about these topics, read our article about how to conduct benchmarking and competitor analyses and what you might consider studying. However, keep in mind that, when shopping for your social media competitor analysis tools, it is important to look closely at what they offer in terms of content insights.

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Fanpage Karma: Unlimited Profile Tracking for Advanced Competitor Analysis

When it comes to analyzing many competitors and the advance analysis that you can do as a result, Fanpage Karma is second to none. Its main advantage over other tools is that it offers unlimited profile tracking across social media networks, which offers greatly enhanced data sets. This is ideal for social media agencies, companies who want to track many competitors, as well as companies that have social media profiles across different countries and regions.

Fanpage Karma offers a wide range metrics you can track as well as the flexibility to analyze different timeframes, whether it is from a specific week or month or even an entire year. Along with unlimited profile tracking, other analytic features include finding the best times to post, hashtag research, and content optimization insights. All this is in addition to powerful and all other benchmarking and competitor analysis features. The tool also offers community management and publishing features that help enable teamwork and efficiency.

You can take advantage of a free 14-day trial of the Fanpage Karma tool as well as a free weekly webinar.