Article

Rick Barron
Rick Barron 15 October 2019

Test, Learn, Re-Evaluate

Social media analysis needs to be a crucial part of your e-commerce strategy because it enables you to perform different tasks that could be of advantageous for your own business.

Social media analysis needs to be a crucial part of your e-commerce strategy because it enables you to perform different tasks that could be of advantageous for your own business. Generating leads, improving your customer service or identifying performance trends are only a few of dozens of reasons why you should use it.

Socially driven competitive intelligence captures users’ conversations, focused both on your brand and the competition, and helps you gather insights that can optimize your customers’ experiences throughout their entire journey with your brand. It also fills in the gaps left by more traditional competitive intelligence approaches, like syndicated sales data and ad-hoc marketing research.

But how is it possible to conduct such an analysis? A social media analytics software can help you with these by analyzing your competition social media performance. On a long-term perspective, it can also help you to be ahead of your e-commerce competitors.

Here’s why socially-driven competitive intelligence takes the utility of social media to a new level, and why it needs to be a part of the way your business shapes its market strategy.

Learn more about your competition

There are multiple important reasons why e-commerce companies should analyze the social media presence of their own brand and as well as their competition.

One of the most important reasons is to understand the social media strategy of your competitors. Analyzing their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. accounts gives you a clear overview of their main business objectives. It also helps you to answer questions like what kind of content do they focus on and who is their key audience?

Therefore, a competitor analysis is inevitable if you want to grow your business. Be a constant learner and try to avoid the mistakes the others are making and learn to be ahead of them. In short, keep learning.

Build your social media analysis of competitor and conduct your ongoing analysis of your opposing brands. Dive into the data to strengthen your social media activities or to create reports that will keep you informed automatically about the development in your industry.

Benchmarks

Social media analytics tools look at a broad variety of data that create some interesting insights that will help businesses to target key areas for development.

The methods of actively analyzing your competitors are manifold. Here are four methods you should check regularly.

1-Audience Size

By taking a look at your social media audience numbers you develop an understanding of how well-known your competitor or your very own brand is.

Especially audience benchmarking gives you a better overview of the presence of your brand on your specific e-commerce marketplace. Through this, it is easier to understand how successful your own social media efforts are or unsuccessful your competitors are.

2-Effective customer service

Take a look at the different channels that are used for customer service by your competitors. Dig deeper into their behavior on the different social networks to find out if they provide dedicated customer service channels or if they use their main page for customer service.

This is a good way of knowing more about the questions your competition receives and how they handle those issues. Not only a solid method to learn more about their strategy, but also a fantastic way to learn more about your own approach.

3-Choose the right social network

Don’t underestimate the importance of knowing on which networks your competitors are distributing their content. This can help you to identify the perfect network for your e-commerce business. For example, the information that your competitor is really successful on Instagram could encourage you also to focus more on this network. Identifying new ways of distributing your content is a great way of attracting new leads for your product.

4-Compare your interactions

Get an understanding of the interaction rate of your page and the ones of your competitors that will help you to get a better understanding of what content is working well and what is not. It helps you to identify what your key target audience is interested in.

Another advantage it could show you is that a video campaign on YouTube is performing well for you or it could show you that your Instagram strategy is not as successful as you wish it would be. By comparing this number, you even get a better understanding of your content strategy. Eventually, it even could change your whole content production process.

Scaling Your Competitive Intelligence Program

With the right competitive benchmarking technology running in the background, automatically categorizing and scoring social conversations, you’re able to free up valuable resources to focus on understanding customers across their brand journey, rather than spend time running traditional, manual research programs.

Many brands are skilled at using social media to market products, build community, boost online engagement, and listen to conversations relevant to their organization, but not many understand how to harness the competitive intel made available through social media in order to make strategic business decisions.

Social media benchmarking isn’t simply useful for a brand’s social media team; it’s relevant to the rest of marketing, sales, customer service, and product teams. With consumers today relying on social networks to guide purchase, understanding how your brand compares to the competition online, and what kinds of conversations are taking place around your competitors, industry, and product, is essential to crafting exceptional customer experiences.

 

About the author

Hi, my name is Rick and I thank you for reading this article!

I explore to learn new stuff every day and here I will share all my experiences and thoughts with you.

You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram. :)

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