Simple Steps for Social Media Competitor Analysis for Small Businesses
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As a small business owner, keeping tabs on your competitors is crucial for understanding market trends, identifying gaps in your strategy, and uncovering new opportunities for growth. Social media competitor analysis, in particular, can provide valuable insights into your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to adapt and enhance your own social media strategy.
In fact, a study by HubSpot shows that 56% of marketers are actively using competitive analysis to improve their own marketing efforts, which demonstrates how valuable it is for businesses of all sizes to understand the competitive landscape on social platforms.
Competitor analysis improves your own marketing efforts
For busy entrepreneurs, competitor analysis might feel overwhelming or like something they don’t have time to learn. That’s why we’ve created this guide to make the process as simple as possible. We’ll break down straightforward steps and simple tools for conducting social media competitor analysis, specifically tailored for small business owners.
These steps will help you assess how your competitors are performing on social platforms and use those insights to refine your own strategy.
What is Competitor Analysis?
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Competitor analysis involves identifying and evaluating rivals in your market or neighborhood. By understanding their strengths and weaknesses, you can discover effective ways to connect with your target audience, learn from their successes, and avoid similar mistakes.
A social media competitor analysis will help you:
Identify who your competitors are on social media
Discover which social media platforms and Google Business Profile they’re using
Understand how they’re using those platforms and profiles
Evaluate the effectiveness of their social and content strategies
Benchmark your own social results against competitors
Recognize potential social threats to your business
Uncover gaps in your own social presence
For small businesses, this type of analysis is invaluable in building a competitive edge without the need for extensive market research. It requires only a bit of time and focused attention, making it accessible even for teams with limited resources.
Competitor Analysis Tools
To simplify and enhance your social media competitor analysis, there are several tools available that provide valuable insights into your competitors’ strategies. While there are plenty of paid tools on the market, we’ve highlighted a few free options here that are ideal for small businesses just getting started.
Cost: Free
Best For: Monitoring competitors’ Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns.
Features: Facebook Ad Library allows you to view any active ads that your competitors are running on Facebook and Instagram. You can search by business name and view details like ad types, visuals, and messaging. This tool is perfect for seeing what types of campaigns resonate with audiences.
Cost: Free, with paid plans available
Best For: Tracking follower growth and engagement metrics on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Features: Social Blade provides insights into a competitor’s follower growth, engagement rate, and performance trends. The platform offers easy-to-read data, making it simple to monitor changes in your competitors’ social presence over time.
Cost: Free
Best For: Receiving updates on competitors’ mentions across the web.
Features: Google Alerts is a very simple tool, which lets you set up alerts for specific keywords or brand names. When your competitor is mentioned in news articles, blogs, or forums, you’ll receive a notification. This tool helps you keep an eye on competitors’ PR and online mentions without needing to visit multiple sites.
Cost: Free
Best For: Checking competitors in your neighborhood for local businesses.
Features: Google Business Profile lets you view competitors’ business information, including customer reviews, photos, hours, and popular times. This tool is particularly valuable for local businesses aiming to attract nearby customers. Make sure your own profile is up-to-date, with a strong rating (ideally higher than competitors in your area), and fully optimized to stand out in local search results.
These tools provide a mix of social media tracking, content analysis, and engagement insights, making it easier for small business owners to perform competitor analysis without investing heavily in complex software.
Step 1: Identify Your Competitors
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The first step in any competitor analysis is identifying who your competitors are. This isn’t always as straightforward as it sounds, especially for small businesses. Competitors could range from direct competitors (those offering the same products or services) to indirect competitors (those targeting the same customer base with a different offering).
Here’s how you can pinpoint your competitors:
Check your industry: Look at businesses in your immediate field. If you sell handmade candles, your competitors will be other small candle makers.
Use social media: Search for relevant hashtags or keywords in your industry to find brands that are active on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok.
Look at location: Local competitors are just as important, especially if you have a brick-and-mortar store. Check what nearby businesses are doing on social media and how they present themselves on Google Business Profiles. For example, if you own a restaurant, type "restaurants" into Google Maps to view competitors’ profiles in your area.
Once you've identified your competitors, create a list of the top 3 to 5 that are most similar to your business. This will allow you to focus your efforts and prevent you from becoming overwhelmed by too much information.
Step 2: Analyze Their Social and Google Profiles
With your competitors selected, it’s time to dive into their social media and Google profiles. For example, if you own a sushi restaurant in Dallas, you can gather a lot of valuable information by simply searching for sushi restaurants in your area on Google, as shown above.
By clicking on their Google Business Profiles, like Sa Sa Sushi's above, you'll gain access to business details, social media links, and other valuable insights into how they present themselves online.
Take note of the following key aspects:
Content themes and topics: What types of posts do they share most often? Are they focusing on product promotions, behind-the-scenes content, or user-generated content?
Post frequency: How often do they post? Consistent posting can be a key indicator of engagement and audience-building.
Visual identity: How do they design their posts? Pay attention to their use of colors, fonts, and overall aesthetic.
Brand voice: Does their tone sound professional, casual, humorous, or something else? How does it resonate with their audience?
Engagement rates: Check the level of engagement (likes, comments, shares) on their posts. A high engagement rate means their content is resonating well with their audience.
Google Business Profile: Check your competitors’ business information, including customer reviews, photos, hours, and popular times. Reviews are particularly valuable as they are publicly available, offering insights that you can leverage to improve your own marketing and customer engagement.
This analysis helps you understand what’s working for your competitors and what might be missing from your own strategy. If a competitor’s content is generating high engagement, try to understand why: is it their timing, their messaging, or their use of visuals?
Step 3: Evaluate Their Audience
Again, Sa Sa Sushi, as mentioned earlier, is a great example of how easily you can gather insights from a restaurant’s Instagram profile, as seen above.
Understanding your competitors’ audience is just as important as evaluating their content. Look at their follower count, comments, and interactions to understand who is engaging with their posts and what kind of audience is responding. This insight can help you refine your own strategy to attract a similar, or even better, audience.
Understanding your competitors’ audience is just as important as evaluating their content
While there are tools that can automatically evaluate all this information for you, we believe this approach is the simplest way for entrepreneurs to start. Later on, you can explore more advanced tools, but keep in mind that they require time to set up and can often be expensive.
Some helpful questions to consider:
Who follows them? Are their followers businesses, influencers, or everyday consumers? How do these followers align with your target market?
What’s the audience engagement like? Are followers commenting, sharing, and interacting regularly? This indicates an active and interested audience.
What are they talking about? Dive into the comments section to see what kinds of conversations are happening. Are customers discussing pain points or requesting specific products or services?
By analyzing your competitors’ audience, you can gain insights into their target market and tailor your content to better serve that group. It also helps you spot opportunities to engage with customers that your competitors might be missing.
Step 4: Monitor Their Paid Advertising Strategy
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Paid social media ads are an essential part of many businesses' strategies, and they can reveal a lot about a competitor’s goals and target audience. While you can’t always see exactly how much your competitors are spending on ads, there are tools available (such as Facebook Ad Library free or AdEspresso) that let you view active ads on Facebook and Instagram.
Look for:
Ad formats: Are they using carousel ads, video ads, or simple image ads?
Targeting: What type of messaging do they use? Who do they seem to be targeting (age, interests, location)?
Call-to-action (CTA): What action do their ads encourage followers to take? Is it to buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, or visit their website?
Understanding how your competitors are using paid ads will give you a better idea of what types of ads you should be experimenting with. Plus, it can help you identify gaps in the market where your business can step in with a unique approach.
Step 5: Identify Strengths and Weaknesses
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Now that you’ve gathered all this data, it’s time to assess your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.
This is where the real insights come in:
Strengths: What are your competitors excelling at? Perhaps they have a particularly engaging Instagram feed, or they are exceptionally good at responding to comments.
Weaknesses: Where are they lacking? Are they inconsistent with posting, or do they have a low engagement rate? Are they not responding to customer inquiries?
Understanding these strengths and weaknesses allows you to build on your own strengths and address areas where your competitors may be faltering. For example, if a competitor has a poorly designed website that customers complain about, you can position your business as the more customer-friendly option.
Step 6: Adapt Your Strategy
Blog post highlighted on Hookle's channels
Hookle published a blog post (after evaluating competitors' blogs and socials) and highlighted it not only on social media but also across other channels, including Google Business Profile and their newsletter, as seen above.
Just like Hookle, use the insights you’ve gathered to adapt and improve your own social media strategy.
This could involve:
Content changes: Maybe you’ve noticed that your competitors’ followers love video content, and you’ve been focusing mostly on photos. Now’s the time to experiment with more videos.
Engagement tactics: If competitors are responding quickly to comments and direct messages, you might want to step up your customer service game on social media.
Content scheduling: If your competitors post at certain times and generate a lot of engagement, consider testing those times for your own posts.
Post updates to Google: Publish updates to your Google Profile frequently, as it's free and keeps your profile fresh. Your latest update is always visible on your Google Profile storefront. And the best part is, you can schedule these updates just like any other social media posts, using management apps (which we’ll discuss next).
Save Time with AI-Powered Social Media Management Apps
Conducting social media competitor analysis can be time-consuming, but with the right tactics, approach, and tools, you can significantly streamline the process. However, publishing content across multiple social channels and Google Profiles might feel daunting. This is where AI-powered scheduling apps like Hookle come in handy.
Hookle offers AI-powered features that help automate content creation, ideation, analysis, and scheduling. With Hookle, you can schedule posts across multiple platforms, including Google Profiles, and receive smart content suggestions based on your business goals. This allows you to save time while keeping your strategy sharp and aligned with market trends.
By following these simple steps for social media competitor analysis, small business owners can gain valuable insights that will improve their marketing strategies and ultimately drive business growth.
Don’t just take our word for it - try it yourself. Download Hookle for free today and take the first step toward simplifying your social media management while gaining actionable insights into your competitors' strategies!
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