Competitor insights: How social media monitoring tools drive better strategies

Competitor analysis is an integral part of running a digital marketing campaign. The purpose of getting your hands on competitors’ insights is to find out what they’re up to.

SEOs keep an eye on the competitors’ backlinks, social media managers spy on competitors’ social campaigns, and bloggers sneak into competitors’ content to understand their strategies.

Social media monitoring tools are pivotal in designing and executing competitor spying strategies regardless of the industry. Competitor analysis tools monitor and report on competitors’ keywords, social media content, SEO rankings, brand mentions, and other engagement metrics.

Brands, influencers, and agencies pay close attention to choosing the right social media analysis tools to equip themselves for running successful social media marketing campaigns.

Let’s understand the importance of competitor insights and how social media monitoring tools can assist going forward.

The importance of competitor insights in modern business

Competitor analysis is essential to keep up with the market standards and norms. To fully comprehend the importance of competitor insights in today’s business world, go through the following points to develop a powerful competitor analysis system:

Understanding product differentiation is essential

It’s crucial to analyze what makes competitors’ products or services unique by examining their unique selling propositions (USPs). Compare your products with competitor products and see how their offerings stand out regarding features, quality, or pricing. It’ll help you identify gaps in their offerings that you can exploit to attract customers.

Example: Usermaven smartly uses the keyword “Google Analytics alternative” yet reveals the distinction between these tools.

Market positioning reveals competitors’ target audience

Try to understand how competitors position themselves within the market, whether as premium, value, or niche brands. Analyzing their positioning can help you identify the demographics and psychographics of their target audience, providing insights into their customer base. It’ll eventually help you identify and target untapped audience segments.

Example: Clockify website clearly states that it’s a free time tracker for teams. It shows that they know who their target audience is. 

Marketing strategies that highlight engagement tactics

Reviewing competitors’ advertising channels, brand messaging, and social media campaigns can reveal how they attract and retain customers. Observing their use of social media, influencer marketing campaigns, and customer engagement methods offers valuable insights into their marketing approach.

Example: LowFruits intelligently uses social media testimonials under their “What People are Saying” section. It’s a great engagement tactic being used for marketing. 

Pricing models are key to competitive analysis

Pricing is a crucial element in competitive analysis. Examining competitors’ pricing strategies, including discounts, bundles, or subscription models, helps uncover opportunities to offer better value. It often leads to developing alternative pricing structures that appeal to wider audiences.

Example: Restream offers multiple pricing plans which are more than most of their competitors on the market. 

Competitors’ customer experience provides lessons to learn

Competitors’ customer service offers essential insights into their strategies. Assessing the quality of competitors’ customer service, return policies, and loyalty programs can reveal their strengths and weaknesses. Customer reviews and testimonials also add valuable information about competitors’ performance in the customer care department.

Example: QuestionDB has an efficient live chat and support system for users to seek help from their support team. The competitors can surely take something away from their customer support system. 

Technological and operational efficiency drive success

Evaluating competitors’ use of technology in operations, such as e-commerce platforms, payment processing, and CRM tools, can uncover best practices. Additionally, analyzing their supply chain efficiency and adaptability to innovation provides insights into their operational strengths.

Example: AppSumo utilizes the Impact affiliate network to run its affiliate marketing program. Impact is one of the best affiliate marketing networks to start, run, and manage an affiliate program. 

How social media monitoring tools gather competitor insights

Social media monitoring tools monitor social media user activities, collect engagement data, and report key metrics through analytics.

Let’s dive deep into the mechanism social media monitoring tools use to detect and compile essential competitor metrics:

1. Track competitor mentions and hashtags

Social media mentions refers to an individual or brand’s handle mentioned during a social media conversation. The general rule of thumb for mentions on social media is to use the “@” sign before the username to tag the specific account.

However, a no-link mention (also known as an unlinked mention) is another type of social media mention in which the user’s handle isn’t linked to the social media profile. For instance, my Instagram ID is hassaannkhann – this is a no-link mention, whereas @hassaannkhann is a normal mention.

Tracking competitor mentions and hashtags assists brands and marketers in gathering useful competitive insights to understand what they’re up to and what they’re thinking.

ContentStudio has an advanced competition analysis tool that lets users track competitor metrics and help dissect their social media strategies.

2. Monitor social media engagement metrics

Social media monitoring tools closely analyze competitors’ engagement metrics to better equip the user. The key performance metrics they monitor are the number (and quality) of comments, likes, shares, impressions, and click-through rates.

Moreover, some social media monitoring tools go deep into capturing social audience demographics such as age, location, gender, and other elements.

However, all top-notch social media management tools have a built-in analytics section that lets users analyze social media content performance.

ContentStudio is a perfect example; it has a powerful social media analytics feature that provides in-depth reporting on social media post performance. Since it has an impressive competitor analysis tool, it lets you identify social media competitors to keep an eye on.

So, by collecting such detailed data about their social campaigns, they’re usually able to understand how their social media content is doing as compared to competitors.

3. Analyze content types and performance.

Going through the top-performing competitors’ content isn’t enough – one must go deep into their social media marketing strategy to see their plan inside-out.

A major factor to look out for is the types of content the competitors are publishing – you must be aware of what’s working well for them.

Is it the long-form articles? Are they big on YouTube videos? Do they have a large Instagram following? Are they publishing vertical videos for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts?

Plus, it’s super important to keep track of their content’s strengths and weaknesses to shift your social media content strategy to follow the new social trends.

ContentStudio has a free Instagram competitor analytics tool that lets Instagram users compare side-by-side with competitors. It can play a crucial role in gaining an advantage over Instagram competitors.

4. Study campaigns, promotions, and launches

One of the essential tactics in understanding competitor insights is to study their social media campaigns, promotional strategies, and product launches.

To gather such competitor insights, one must be following them across multiple channels without getting noticed, for instance:

• Join their email list to see what they’re sending to their subscribers
• Follow them across all social media platforms to understand their social strategy
• Use their product to get first-hand experience using their product
• Avail their discount offers to get to know about their promotional strategies

Capitalize on every opportunity to comprehend their social media strategy so that you can prepare yourself for designing even better social media marketing campaigns.

Vaizle uses a popup notification tool that displays recent sign-ups on the website. It showcases the purchase activities to the visitors and brings in more authority.

5. Spy on influencer marketing campaigns

Brands, influencers, and agencies keep track of their competitors’ marketing campaigns to stay ahead — whether it’s the social media content or influencer marketing campaign — the goal is to keep an eye on their every move.

Competitor insights help them create, execute, and optimize their influencer marketing strategies going forward. Social media monitoring tools are crucial in analyzing competitors’ social media statistics for clarity.

ContentStudio has a built-in influencer discovery tool that helps users discover influencers using relevant hashtags or brand names. Users can find influencers on the Instagram and X (Twitter) platforms.

6. Keep an eye on brand partnerships and collaborations.

Brand partnerships, sponsorship, and collaborations provide essential insights into a brand or influencer’s business growth. Don’t shy away from keeping an eye out for competitors’ brand deals, sponsorships, and collaborations.

Utilize social media monitoring tools that track crucial engagement metrics, such as mentions, hashtags, and other social media elements.

For instance, Epic Gardening collaborated with Bird Feeder in a recent video. Not only did it allow the Epic Gardening audience to learn about this new product for the garden, but it also opened a brand partnership opportunity for Epic Gardening.

So, these are some of the popular ways social media monitoring tools use to gather competitor insights.

Strategic benefits of competitor insights from social media monitoring

Let’s dive deep into the benefits of competitor insights from social media monitoring and try to comprehend why companies and influencers pay attention to this:

1. Understanding social media marketing trends

Competitor insights help you spot emerging trends by analyzing how other players in your industry engage with their audience. It allows you to see what type of content competitors are putting out, what hashtags they’re using, and how they interact with the audience. It keeps your digital marketing strategies relevant and aligned with audience preferences.

2. Identifying social media content gaps

Social media content gaps refer to the missing points in your strategy. Observing competitors on social media can uncover areas where their content is lacking. Finding these gaps enables brands and influencers to put out more content and bring depth to their content strategy.

3. Gaining insights into niche audience interests

Audience interests are the areas your target audience is interested in or wants to know more about. Monitoring competitors’ content reveals what resonates most with your target demographic. This helps you craft more engaging and relevant social media marketing campaigns.

4. Learning new social media engagement tactics

Social media engagement is as important of an element as the social media content itself. Analyzing competitors’ engagement tactics inspires innovative ways to interact with your audience. Don’t hold yourself back from using fresh approaches to commenting, campaign management, or community building.

5. Finding influencers to collaborate with

Competitor collaborations with influencers can help guide you in creating better influencer collaborations. All you need is to pay close attention to what brands are doing, what influencers say, and how they conduct influencer marketing campaigns.

Related Read: How to leverage social media influencers to discover new audiences

6. Improve customer care services

Undoubtedly, it’s vital to have a vibrant, efficient customer care service to cater to the audience. One of the aspects of studying competitor insights is to see how they’re dealing with their customers or prospects. It’ll eventually lead to more engagement and customer satisfaction.

Also Read: How to develop a customer care strategy for your brand?

7. Assist in benchmarking and goal setting

One of the benefits of competitor insights for social media monitoring is that it allows users to set benchmarks for their social media content, which is comparing your content with industry standards. Thus, it paves the way for setting new goals for your social media reach, engagement, and growth.

So, these are some of the many benefits of diving into competitor insights using social media monitoring.

Integrating competitor insights into your strategy

Competitor insights bring awareness and improve content quality if utilized well. Here’s how you can infuse competitor insights into your social media marketing strategy:

1. Choose social media platforms where competitors are most active

First things first, start with choosing the right social media platforms. You don’t want to be on a social media platform where your audience doesn’t exist. One way to discover the audience’s existence is by observing the competitors’ behaviors.

Competitors’ insights provide a good idea about choosing suitable social media platforms, creating content, and building an audience.

2. Keep an eye out for the social media trends competitors are following

One of the ways to integrate competitors’ insights into your social media marketing strategy is by following social media trends competitors are excited about. It includes what hashtags they’re using, what events they’re focusing on, when they’re offering discounts, etc.

Always be on the lookout for what campaigns they’re running and what events they’re trying to capitalize on social media.

3. Elicit competitors’ social media content strategy to implement

Tony Robbins talked about the strategy of “eliciting the secret sauce of successful people” in his book Unlimited Power. You should extract successful people’s strategy and utilize it in your business.

When it comes to competitors’ insights, you can elicit competitors’ secret sauce and implement it in your social media plan. You don’t have to copy the exact social media strategy of the competitors, but a sneak peek at their content, style, and timing can go a long way.

4. Take inspiration from competitors’ audience engagement tactics

One of the ways to integrate competitors’ insights is by analyzing competitors’ audience engagement tactics. Understanding how they attract, engage, and convert the audience is a valuable initiative that will help the cause.

Get inspired by their social media strategies, content publishing, the time interval between posts, hashtags selection, and more.

5. Look at the types of social content competitors are consistently publishing

A key element of observing and integrating competitors’ insights into your strategy is keeping a close eye on the types of social media content they’re focusing on. Try to notice whether they’re putting out images, videos, infographics, or text-based posts more often.

It’ll give you a good idea about what’s working for your competitors. All you have to do is to infuse some of their strategic bits into your social media strategy.

Common mistakes to avoid in competitor monitoring

It’s crucial to identify and avoid mistakes that brands and marketers make when they’re analyzing their competitors. Here are the common mistakes to avoid in competitor monitoring:

1. Focusing too much on one competitor

A common mistake inexperienced social media managers make is concentrating solely on a single competitor, which can lead to a narrow perspective.

Diversify your monitoring efforts to better understand the industry landscape and social media marketing trends. Always be on the lookout for potential competitors on the market.

2. Ignoring smaller or emerging competitors

One of the mistakes many influencers and social media experts make is that they usually ignore smaller competitors and go after the big fish.

Overlooking smaller competitors or new entrants can be a missed opportunity. They often bring fresh ideas and innovative strategies that could disrupt the market or inspire your approach. So, ignore entirely smaller yet emerging competitors.

3. Copying competitors without adaptation

Avoid copying competitors without understanding the context because blindly imitating competitor strategies can backfire. The reason is that you don’t have the full context of their decision-making.

It’s best to tailor insights to your brand’s unique identity and audience instead of replicating tactics without adding your flavor to it.

4. Neglecting audience feedback

Audience feedback provides essential insights into product or service quality. Getting honest feedback from loyal customers is extremely helpful in the growth journey.

Therefore, focusing only on what competitors are doing and ignoring audience feedback is a critical mistake that sabotages brand value and positioning. Pay attention to how their audience reacts to their campaigns to understand what works and what doesn’t.

5. Failing to track over time

Tracking competitor insights once or twice won’t cut it because occasional tracking doesn’t provide meaningful insights.

Consistent tracking over time reveals patterns, trends, and long-term strategies that can help you identify important campaign insights.

6. Overanalyzing and delaying action

One of the mistakes to avoid when doing competition analysis is to spend too much time analyzing competitors instead of taking action on them. Overanalyzing often leads to missed opportunities.

So, try to do solid analysis and train yourself to take timely action to ensure your brand stays agile and competitive. Keep an eye on the competitors to find out when and how they shift their social media marketing strategy.

Tools to drive competitor insights through social media monitoring

There are a bunch of social media monitoring tools on the market. However, knowing the most trusted and well-known tools is essential to understanding competitor insights. Let’s take a look at some of the best social media monitoring tools to get the job done:

1. ContentStudio

ContentStudio is an advanced social media management dashboard for publishing, scheduling, managing, and analyzing. It offers a complete social media toolkit to plan, curate, publish, and analyze content across all major social media platforms.

It’s an AI-powered social media dashboard that offers several AI-based tools for generating articles, social posts, hashtags, and images. Moreover, ContentStudio provides many free AI social media content generators for social media users to create social media content.

Brands, influencers, and agencies choose this tool due to its affordable pricing, user-friendly interface, and high-quality software service. This award-winning social media monitoring and management tool is trusted by over 14,000 happy customers worldwide. Try a 14-day free trial now!

Key features

• Social publishing/scheduling
• Social media content planner
• AI writing assistant
• Competitor analytics
• Influencer discovery
• Social queues for reposting
• Team collaboration
• Approval workflow
• Social media analytics
• Third-party tools integration
• Free AI social media generators

Pricing

• Standard: $19 per month
• Advanced plan: $49 per month
• Agency unlimited plan: $99 per month

How to gain competitor insights using ContentStudio

Here are the steps involved in accessing competitor insights using ContentStudio:

Step #1: Log in to your ContentStudio

First things first, log in to your ContentStudio account. If you haven’t signed up for an account, then go ahead and create your account.

ContentStudio offers a 14-day free trial with no strings attached.

Step #2: Choose the respective workspace

Create the workspace for the brand. If you created one in the past, choose one from the dashboard’s top left corner.

Step #3: Access the competitor analytics option

Access the competitor analytics section through the Analytics section. All you have to do is click the Analytics button from the top menu bar.

The competitor analytics option is available on the left sidebar in the Analytics section.

Step #4: Set up the competitor analytics for tracking

Now set up the competitor analytics for tracking in the ContentStudio dashboard. 

You can do Instagram and Facebook competitor analysis using ContentStudio’s competitor analysis tool as of now.

2. YouScan

YouScan is a well-known AI-driven platform specializing in social media listening and competitor analysis. It empowers brands to analyze consumer sentiments, extract actionable insights, and safeguard their brand reputation. It specializes in evaluating brand visibility in comparison to competitors and providing essential insights to drive social media marketing strategy better than ever.

Key features:

• Social media listening
• Brand management
• Competitor analysis
• Trends analysis
• Influencer marketing

Pricing:

Starts at $299 per month (billed annually)

3. Mention

Mention is a powerful social media monitoring tool that helps brands and influencers understand their brand position across different platforms. It deepens into competitor analysis, market research, PR campaigns, and brand analysis to provide insightful data. It utilizes several online sources to stay informed about competitor activities and provides crucial data to build and improve social media strategy.

Key features:

• Competitor analysis
• Social media publishing
• PR management
• Brand management
• Crisis management
• Market research

Pricing:

• Solo plan: $49 per month
• Pro plan: $99 per month
• Pro plus plan: $179 per month
• Company plan: Contact sales team

4. Keyhole

Keyhole is an intuitive tool designed to help brands, agencies, and organizations effectively monitor their social media footprint. It assists users in gaining insights into public conversations about their brand, keeping tabs on industry trends, and tracking competitor activities across major social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.

Key features:

• Social media listening
• Social media analytics
• Hashtags tracking
• Competitor analysis
• Brand monitoring

Pricing:

Starts at $100 per campaign

5. Emplifi

Emplifi is a comprehensive social media monitoring solution that offers real-time insights to help brands understand their audience and respond quickly to important industry trends. It’s an all-in-one platform that enhances engagement and brand awareness while improving the efficiency of your social media efforts.

Key features:

• Social media management
• Social commerce integration
• AI-powered visual aid
• Social customer care
• Customized services

Pricing:

Contact the sales team

Conclusion

Competitor insights are the essential data showcasing what’s working for competitors on social media and providing useful insights into their content strategy.

Brands, influencers, and agencies use different social media monitoring tools for analyzing competitor social media insights. The core purpose of diving deep into competitors’ social media content insights is to help tap into their tactics and understand their strategies.

It gives them a chance to get inspiration, find content gaps, and discover hot trending topics in the niche. Therefore, opting for the right set of social media monitoring tools is the key to building and executing a competitor analysis strategy.

FAQs about competitor insights using social media monitoring tools

Let’s take a look at some of the commonly asked questions related to the topic:

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is an analysis of social media content performance. It gives useful insights into social media content accomplishment. A social media monitoring tool is required to access competitor analytics, trending content, and other brand monitoring data.

What is the best social monitoring tool?

There are numerous social media monitoring tools on the market, but ContentStudio offers a built-in competitor analysis tool that helps brands, marketers, and agencies in social media monitoring.

How is AI used in social media monitoring?

AI can be used for various jobs, such as hashtag generation, trending topics hunting, competitor finding, and others. ContentStudio provides several AI-based social media publishing and analysis tools for marketers and social media managers.

How to monitor competitors on social media?

It’s best to use a competitor analysis tool to give useful insights within no time. However, manual competitor monitoring isn’t going to cut it. ContentStudio has a comprehensive competitor analysis tool embedded in the Analytics section.