How to Use Social Media Competitor Reports

You may have heard of Sprout Social, but if you haven’t, it’s a powerful tool for planning, evaluating, and improving your social media. You can publish & schedule posts, monitor engagement and analyze your results across several platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter, from a single dashboard. Not only does Sprout Social save you time, but more importantly, it allows you to uncover trends and actionable insights to improve your social media strategy. One set of insight report that’s we’ve come to rely heavily on are the Competitors reports. These analyze your publishing and engagement efforts against your competitors to see how you stack up.

Before being able to utilize these reports, it’s important to note that you must tell Sprout Social who your competitors are. From the report, you want to select the + icons in the right-side filtering as shown here: 

You can now type in your competitors, one by one, to add their profiles.

For the most part, competitor data is collected from the day the competitor’s profile is added to your dashboard. So, it’s critical to add your competitors ASAP, otherwise, there won’t be data to analyze!

Now, let’s look specifically at the Facebook Competitor Report to identify the metrics that are important.

Fans: The number of Facebook fans each profile has

Here, you can see how your popularity measures up against your competitors. Ideally, you want to have more fans than the Competitor Average. If you don’t, you should focus your social media strategy on building awareness and followers.

Audience Growth: The net growth in Facebook fans

Presented as both a chart and table, you can see how your fan growth (or loss) compares to your competitors. Ideally, you’d be growing fans as quickly as they are. If you’re not, you should once again consider how to improve your growth strategy. 

Message Volumes: The quantity & type of Facebook posts published and their corresponding engagements.

Presented as both a graph and table, we recommend paying attention to the table. Here you can see not only the # of posts being published but the type: Text (A), Picture (Image Icon), or Video (Play Icon). Although it’s important to post as frequently as your competitors, it’s far more important to be matching or exceeding their video content quantities. As we all know, video is substantially more engaging than a picture and exponentially more engaging than simple text.

Looking next at your engagements, look towards the last column where you’ll find Public Engagements per Post. This is an indicator of how well received your posts were, on average. Things like content type, total impressions, and even time of day published can contribute to a posts’ success, as measured by engagement. If you find your engagements per posts falling behind your competitors, consider why that might be and form some hypothesis. It may be as simple as them posting more video than you. But normally, the answer is more complex. To answer it, more in-depth research is typically necessary that includes anecdotal information for which a software simply can’t explain.

In Conclusion

Sprout Social Competitor reports are available for each major social media network. So, it’s important to utilize the reports for each network you’re active on. Likely, you’ll find yourself beating your competitors on one network and falling behind on another. Although these reports can’t give you all the answers, they are an important step in understanding how your current strategy is working. If you’d rather leave the data analysis and strategy to the professionals, Trifecta Marketing Services can help! Learn more about our services by visiting www.trifectamarketingservices.com/social-digital.