​Are you looking for ways to improve your social media marketing but you feel like you have run out of ideas? Are you losing hope in getting your spot as a small business in this world of giant businesses? How about this, have you looked at how your competitors are using social media? If not, perhaps you should start now. Getting a glance on how your social media marketing compares to similar businesses is a great avenue to improve and build new strategies this is called Competitive Analysis. Here are some tools to help you in getting to know more your competitors and gather data to analyze their activities.

​1. Google Alerts sends reports right to your inbox. If you want to know every single time your competitor is mentioned online, whether as a link or simply a mention, you’ll get that report. You can monitor keywords as well!

​2. SocialMention tells you what’s being said about that term you searched. You can see how many times and how often it’s mentioned and you even can subscribe to an RSS feed for that term, so you never miss a beat.

​3. Topsy looks up your competitors’ tweets and gives free information when you type in a site. You can see how many tweets that company had, a list of those tweets, and which tweets were influential.

​4. Marketing Grader gives each of your competitors an overall score based on social media activity, blogging success, SEO, and lead generation. It’s fun to see if their score fluctuates and then to notice if your score does the same.

​5. Competitive Research & Keyword Research Gadget gives information about your competitors once you’ve placed it on your site. In other words, it’s more of a “gadget” than a tool, meaning it’s a little button you can use to find information.

​6. InfiniGraph tracks what is trending in your social media circles by focusing on your specific industry. The idea behind this tool is that you “use the power of your audience to know what content and brands are trending with them.”

​7. Instapaper saves web pages for later to read on your computer or mobile phone. When it comes to spying on your competition, it’s incredibly helpful to know who your competition is, and this tool will help save contents from competitor sites that might be of use to you.

​8. Monitor Backlinks allows you to follow different competitors’ backlinks and have them sent straight to your inbox, with a description of which are the highest domains and which are the lowest. You have a dashboard you can look at and compare your results. Use it to look at links your competitors are earning.

​9. SEMRush specializes in competitor data. You can visit the homepage and type in a competitor’s website and immediately get information regarding organic keywords and rank, ad keywords, and traffic. The best part: it all comes to you in a graphic format.

​10. SpyFu lets you know which keywords your competitors are targeting, both in organic search and in AdWords. You simply type in your competitor and you can download an entire list of these keywords.

​11. Website Review from WooRank helps you track and optimize your website based on the results your project. If you want to spy on competitors, you can check their potential projects.

​12. SimilarWeb allows you to get traffic insights for any website. Get global rank, country rank, and category rank of that website, along with a nice graph that shows the weekly number of visitors in the last 6 months. You can see how many leads come from social, search, referrals, display ads, and many more. 

​13. Compete Digital Marketing Solutions gives you access to competitive rank and unique visitors when you type in a domain. You can also export the CSV to help get your whole team involved.

​14. What Runs Where has some great features for watching your competition. It supports over 40 ad networks across several different countries and allows you to track a list of your competitors. You then get an alert every time that competitor launches a new ad or publishes new content.

​15. Open Site Explorer allows you to follow your competitors’ link-building efforts. You can see who is linking back to them regarding PageRank, authority/domain, and anchor text. You also can compare link data.

​16. Alexa has been rating websites for a long time. This tool does it all when it comes to spying on your competitors and is an excellent resource if your competitors are international.

​17. Simply Measured offers everything you possibly could want to know about your competitors – trends, traffic and conversions, analysis, social media, etc. There are 35 different reports you can access.

​18. Majestic SEO allows you to download the link profile for any of your competitors’ sites. This means thousands and thousands of links will be right at your fingertips.

​19. The Search Monitor offers great information. It focuses solely on competitor data. Also, it allows you to monitor affiliates and trademarks. It monitors results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, and Baidu along with blogs, websites, forums, news, mobile, and shopping.

​20. iSpionage allows you to type in a competitor and see the best performing keywords for organic as well as for PPC, and how much the competitor spends on both organic and paid search. You can see the competitor’s most effective ad copy, and you can look at graphs that compare all of this data.

​Now that you’re equipped with some of the strongest tools to monitor and analyze your competitors’ presence across social media, it’s now time to think about some of the top content you saw that blew you away. Innovate and apply them to your strategy.

If you are still struggling in processing all the data and no results are seen, maybe it’s time to consult a social media expert. This might be the best option so that you would be able to conquer social media marketing challenges

​In this very competitive market, it is really important to know exactly where your social media strategy stands, compared to your competitors. It’s essential to know how you could monitor and make use of competitor data to make smart decisions for your own business.

This is why it is convenient to have an expert in social media to guide you in getting to know your competitors but if you haven’t decided on getting one, here are guides and tips to provide you a clear picture of your competition. From what they’re doing well to what they’re not and everything in-between. This will help shape your strategy into a winning one.

​Looking at your competitors’ social accounts and activity, as well as using social media tools to monitor it. It’s also getting a better understanding of what the social media landscape looks like in your industry.

​Knowing who they are, collecting data about them, and breaking that data down into something you can understand. These are key points you need to do to have a successful analysis of your competitor’s business.

​The very first step to analyzing your competitors is definitely knowing who they are. It’s seems to be impossible without this step. You have to do this now and do it properly to get you in a good place. If you don’t know them yet, these are ways to know them:

1. Checkout who your audiences follow. Checkout your audiences’ social media accounts and look for similar businesses as yours. Take note of these businesses.

2. Search keywords on Google. This is a very easy way to see a list of your top competitors as the search engine will likely show you the top businesses on that keyword. Again, list them down.
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Use three to five of the competitors to study. You want this number to make sure you have enough manageable data.

​Here are data you need to be looking for from your list of competitors in order for you to conduct the analysis more effectively.

1. Know what social media platforms are they on.
2. How many followers do they have?
3. How often do they post?
4. What do they often post and how are the engagement on the posts?

​Once you have collected these data, use competitive analysis tools to analyze and understand them. It’s very important that you fully understand the data so that you can use it to your advantage and in coming up with your own social media strategy.

​It’s hard to be keeping up with lots of data if you will not have an organized way of collating them. Make sure that you have figured out what works best for you in arranging all the information your gather around. Remember, the more data you have, the more organized and systematized you should be. 

​Focus in understanding the data and results. Do not conclude right away but instead, try to understand why some organizations are successful, why others are not, and where you fit into that equation. Remember, always base your conclusions on the result of your analysis and not just from your observations.

Be Imaginative and Innovative

​Once you get an idea on what works for your competitors, you need to imagine why it worked and then come up with new ideas and perks that will more likely give your business an edge over the others. Make sure you always follow the Golden Rules to Successful Social Media Marketing. You can come up with totally new ideas or innovate what they are doing to fit your business! Remember, the more authentic, the better.

Be Meticulous 

​Aside from getting ideas on your competitor’s strategies, you may also look for places they are not very good at or look for things that are lacking in their social media strategy. If you are able to cater to these unanswered needs of customers, you will do very well. Remember, anything they lack is a chance for you to do it better and give your brand an edge.

Be Unique

​While it’s a great start to base your social media strategy on what already works for your competitors and what they are lacking, it is still a goal to come up with ideas that will make you stand out. Try to think of new and unique contents that will build interactions with your audiences. Find out where you are best at and start marketing it. Remember, anything original that’s happening in your industry will catch the attention of your target market.

Be Consistent

​Analyzing and monitoring your social media competitors should not just be done once or until you have come up with your own strategy. It is supposed to be a continuous process. You need to keep an eye on your competitors to know if there are new activities that they are doing. Also make sure to check if there are new competitors that paved their way. Get to know them and the technique they used to rise up. Remember, social media changes everyday and so as the demands and interests of your customers!

​A social media competitive analysis gives you an amazing advantage by providing you with the insight and information you need to create a winning social media strategy. You need to use this wisely to have a better understanding on how things work in your industry and what your competition is doing to cope with the trends.

​At this point, you are already equipped with the knowledge on how you can get to know your competitors and analyze their activities. If you need any help, you can look for best social media company to help you out in making sure that you have a good analysis and understanding of your competitors.