What exactly is "Competitive Brand Analysis"?
Competitive brand analysis is a method of identifying your direct competitors and ascertaining their marketing strategies while pinpointing their strengths and weaknesses. This may sound like quite a grind, but with the wonders of Facebook, it is a relatively straightforward task!
Facebook has been with us for a while now but it still remains the first point of contact for marketers aiming to extract audience data and valuable insights. So the aim of this guide is to explain the key elements you need to research in relation to your competitors' tactics on Facebook and how you can use these to analyse your competitors brand performance.
The four key elements of Facebook marketing are:
Engagement
Engagement is an action someone takes on your Facebook Page or one of your posts, the most common being likes, comments, and shares, but it can also include checking in to your location or tagging your business in a post. These actions matters because they can help extend organic reach. Engagement helps boost your placing in a users news feed by the Facebook algorithm plus likes/shares expose your posts to your audience’s extended network.
Reach: Reach is the number of people that content is seen by on Facebook. This can be by either organic or paid efforts. You can see an overview of the reach by going to your page insights, and if you want more details, you can click on the Reach tab.
Average engagement rate per post: This metric represents the sum of likes, comments and shares on a specific post divided by the number of total posts divided by 100.
Page growth: Although is considered a vanity metric, it shows you how far your content can reach audiences on Facebook, and it helps you create custom audiences for ads campaigns.
There are many tools available that allow you to input this information and produce a report, but as an entrepreneur and small business owner, you may be operating on a limited budget, so for now, tracking the data manually is perfectly suitable.
Here are the key factors to analyse when trying to understand a competitor's Facebook content strategy:
What type of posts are they publishing?
Figure out the nature of posts they usually share and how is it working well for their brand image.
Which media are they using the most?
What is the ratio of text, photos, videos and links in the content they are sharing on their fan page? If one content format is performing better, take a note of it.
What time do they usually post?
Most brands share content during peak traffic hours. See if that's the case or they post at regular intervals outside of peak hours.
How frequently are they posting?
Do they share content more than once a day or is it just a few times a week? This tells you how active they are on Facebook.
Which posts receive the most engagement?
It's not uncommon for digital marketers to run engagement ads on Facebook to "boost" their posts and gather look-alike audiences. This is why it becomes important to check what's the ratio of their boosted posts vs non-boosted posts and which ones perform better for their audience (and why).
The key points to measure in Facebook engagement, are how well the fans are interacting with the posts your competitors share on their fan page are likes, shares, and comments. If the number of times a post has been shared is high, it's quite likely that their audience is loving what they post and likes to share it with their friends.
Even though comments are not a direct factor to demonstrate the likeability of a piece of content, it's still an important factor to consider if the brand does interact with their audience on a regular basis. It also tells how involved the fans are with the brand's image and fan page and how comfortable they are in sharing their comments with the public. If the brand is paying attention to what their fans are saying, they are most likely working with a sound social media strategy.
So, once you notice their traits and behaviours on their fan page, you can almost replicate that for your audience if you are in the same niche.
As an entrepreneur and business owner it is essential to figure out what other businesses in your niche are doing on social media, it can help you not just brainstorm ideas for your own social content, but it can also give you an insight into the current habits of the audience your business needs to target. It is the most essential step in defining your overall digital marketing strategy, as it can help avoid making the same mistakes your competition may be making putting you ahead of the game.