When you take your business on the social media platform, then it becomes essential to keep yourself updated about what your competitors are doing. You need to understand how they are leveraging the social media platforms for reaching out to their audience and enhancing the user engagement.
Here are the steps you need to do for competitor research:
1.) Identify your competitors: The first thing that you need to do is to find your competitors. If you are a local business, then find the ones in your area and see what platforms they are using and how they are communicating with their target customers. The best way to find your competitors is through Google. You can search with the keywords that people use or that are related to your business, and you will get a list of all the related brands and products. Visit each of those websites and research what they are doing and on which platforms they are active.
2.) Gather data: It is best to find 5 top competitors and maintain their social media records for each of the platform i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other. There are plenty of social media analytics tools available that help you with the analysis of various metrics. They will help you to compare your profile with other competitor profiles and present you with details like engagement, influence, total followers, mentions, hashtags, top posts and others.
3.) Analyze their activity charts: You can also analyze the activity profile of your competitors. See how frequent they post, how they handle criticism, how they reply to their audience and what is unique about their posts and their profile. Based on such data you should create and do your social media profiling.
The key here is not to copy but to get inspiration on how to improve your posts and increase the user engagement.