Fortunately, your business doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Chances are, you can gain a good understanding simply by reviewing your competitor’s social content strategy. In this post, we’re going to look at how you can scope out your competitors and apply their best tactics to your social media strategy.

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy

Your first step in creating a competitive social media strategy is selecting your competitors. You will want to find businesses similar to yours, but not limit your analysis to competitors of a specific size. For example, you may have a small local marketing agency, but you will want to include other small local agencies along with larger ones that offer similar services in your competitive analysis. Marketing agencies, large and small, are often going after similar or the same audiences.

If you have a Rival IQ account, you can add your competitors to your landscape. Creating a competitive landscape will help you with your initial research and future monitoring. If you don’t have one, you can sign up for a free trial today–no credit card required.

Step 2: Review Competitor Profiles

A great social media campaign starts with solid social profiles and pages. Here are some things you will want to analyze to see how your competitors have set up their social presence.

What wording do your competitors use in their social bios?

Since you usually have less than 200 characters to describe your business to a first-time page visitor, you will want it to be succinct and capture the value you bring to the market. See what your competitors have to say about their business, particularly noting keywords they include. And regardless of what your competitors do, be sure to squeeze your URL into your description to increase the traffic potential from those networks. This tactic is especially on Twitter and Instagram, as you will only see the URL in your profile in some areas of the site like search results.

Rival IQ collects all this data in one place:

What images do your competitors use?

Imagery tells the story of your brand. While photos have always been a key component of social media, every social network provides a way to share native video with your audience.

All of the imagery you share goes a long way toward branding your social media presence. See how your competitors use images and find a creative way to brand your own profiles. In Rival IQ, you can see all of your competitor’s photo and video posts in one grid view. On the grid view, you can filter social media posts by content type (photo, video, etc.), by a competitor (to spot branding patterns, campaigns, etc.), or by metrics like engagement rate and engagement total. Using the right images and video content is a crucial part of your social media strategy.

Step 3: Analyze Your Competitors’ Content and Social Media Strategy

Once you have a great profile, you will need to create content for your social media updates. Here are some things to note about your competitors’ social media strategy.

Do your competitors share their own content and/or content from other industry news sites and blogs?

Businesses use social media in a variety of ways. Some use social media as a way to share the latest industry news and updates with their audience by posting links to content on a regular basis. The content may be a mixture of their own and off-site articles. If your competitors are sharing a mixture, see which updates are receiving the most engagement (replies, likes, shares, etc.) to decide on what approach will be best for your business.

This screenshot shows how Rival IQ’s software pulls in all the top-performing posts amongst competitors:

Do your competitors use images, video, or other media in their updates?

Videos bring in the most engagement on Facebook, and other social networks enable the sharing of native video to keep your audience engaged and growing.  See how competitors’ media type enriched updates performance to determine whether your target audience would be interested.

How often (and when) do your competitors post updates? When do they get engagement?

A key component of social media content is timing. If your business is going after a local audience, you should post updates when that audience is likely to be online. If your business is going after a worldwide audience, then you will need to do some experimentation on when your updates receive the most traction. You can refer to the Science of Social Timing Infographic created by KISSmetrics and Dan Zarrella that shows the most popular time zones for targeting social media updates. Better yet, you can also use Rival IQ to see how many updates your competitors are posting within a specific timeframe.

How often do your competitors engage with others?

Social media is not a one-way broadcasting system. You will probably be able to see the difference in overall engagement between your competitors that are responding to their followers and fans vs. the ones that are not. Regardless of what your competitors are doing, you should always make it a point to engage with your social media audience by responding to mentions and direct messages on Twitter, replying to comments on your Facebook wall and Instagram feed, and replying to comments on posts within LinkedIn groups.

Step 4: Monitor Your Competitors’ Changes

While you will derive a lot of valuable information in your initial competitor research, you will want to make sure you are monitoring them on a regular basis to see if they are changing their strategies. Rival IQ can help you quickly see when a competitor’s approach to social media and their results are changing at a glance on the major social networks.

You can also find out when your competitors change specific things within their social media profiles such as their profile photos and bios.

Now that you have a few ideas of how to use competitive data in building your social media strategy, put them to work!

This article was originally published in 2016 and has since been updated.

The post How to Research Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy appeared first on Rival IQ.

Creating a solid social media strategy can help you gain the social media engagement you seek for your business, whether your goal is customer acquisition or customer satisfaction.

I have found the best way to raise the engagement bar is by:

1. using competitor research and analysis,
2. improving your positioning,
3. and connecting with the right people or influencers.

I’m going to walk through each of these, and use examples of how to do it quickly and easily with Rival IQ – one of my favorite social media analytics tools.

7 Steps to Boosting Social Media Engagement

Step 1: Find the Right Social Networks for Your Business

The first step to great social engagement for any business is to see which social networks drive the most social engagement for your niche or industry. Let’s say that your company plans to create the next big ecommerce software platform, and you want to be where people want to talk about ecommerce software and related topics.

Competitive research can help you determine what social networks will be right for your business.

Some businesses make the mistake of focusing on just one or two of their competitors. But the truth is, you have to look at a good sampling of your competitors: both the larger ones and the smaller ones. Your sampling should also include the ones that are the same as you, and the ones that might have a bit of a different angle.

In the case of ecommerce software platforms, you have large, well-known companies, like Shopify. And you have smaller ones that are working their way to the top, like PrestaShop. And you have ones that offer free open source platforms, like CubeCart. In fact, there are dozens to choose from that represent different types of ecommerce software platforms.

If you took the time to research even a dozen of these companies’ social profiles, you would probably spend a few hours trying to find them all and jotting down their positioning, number of followers and other content you could find. Judging the engagement they receive from each network would take even longer.

This is where Rival IQ comes in handy. You start by creating a landscape and adding companies to that landscape that represent the majority of your competitors. You can easily add a dozen of companies to your list within a few minutes or less.

Creating a new landscape in Rival IQ is fast and easy.

Once you’ve added your competitors to your landscape, you just wait for Rival IQ to pull in their data. Depending on the popularity of your competitors, the data may be populated immediately.

To determine which social network would fit your business best, you can evaluate which social networks the competitors in this landscape have a presence.

eCommerce Platform competitive landscape set up in Rival IQ.

You can learn a few things from this chart right away.

• The majority of your competitors are on all of the top social networks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and Instagram.
• The social networks utilized by all of your competitors are Twitter and Facebook. If you were to only join two social networks today, they should be Twitter and Facebook.
• The social networks least utilized by all of your competitors are Instagram and YouTube. This doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t be on those networks, however. We will discuss this later in the post.

Of course, this isn’t the end-all of your research. This is just where you get started.

Step 2:  Analyze Potential Audience Market Size

The next thing you will want to see is the actual audience size of your competitors on each social network. While social media is not necessarily a numbers game, it can give you a feel of what to expect in terms of the number of fans or followers you could build on each social network.

In Rival IQ’s Social Cross Channel Detailed Metrics, you can see an overview of how large your competitors’ audiences are on each of the social networks with a cool aggregate view.

Rival IQ cross channel metrics shows an aggregate view of fans across the top social networks.

Now, you can get a clearer picture of your competitors’ presence on social networks. But before you get excited about things like having a social audience of 1.1 million members, there are a few things to note.

• Your competitors’ audience across multiple networks could be duplicated. Fans who like the on one network may like them elsewhere.
• A percentage of your competitors’ audience could be inactive. When Facebook scrubbed pages of inactive likes in March 2015, some pages lost tens of thousands of followers. [1]
• Your competitors may have paid for advertising to build their audience. Hence, if you are not willing to devote a budget to your audience growth, you might have to invest a lot of work and time to see similar audience growth.

Of course, the number of fans and followers your competitors have on each social network isn’t the most important thing to consider – but it’s a vital benchmark.

Step 3: Understand How Active You Need to Be

You now know the range of followers your competitors have across the top networks, so you can make sure to establish a baseline of social fans in order to “be in the game”.  But to engage with these followers, you need to make sure your activity level is enough to get their attention.

In the same cross channel metrics, Rival IQ enables you to quickly understand activity levels, and where the action is.

In this case, we are looking at activity over a 7-day period. But you can see even with that timeframe that to be in this game, you need to have activity on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram. As above, Twitter and Facebook seem to lead the pack from an activity standpoint.

Step 4:  Know Where the Engagement is Happening

Presence, audience and activity are critical foundational pieces toward social media success – but engagement is where the rubber hits the road! As you think about where to focus, engagement should drive your decision.

You need to understand what level of engagement to expect or strive for in this market.

There are several ways to look at engagement levels in Rival IQ:

1. First is overall social engagement, meaning total interactions for this time period across these five networks.

Here, you can see that although competitors like Shopify have a large Facebook following, they get a lot of engagement on Instagram.

You may also note that while many of your competitors are on social networks like Google+, only one gets engagement on that network. And that engagement is minimal compared to the engagement they receive on the other social networks.

2. A second engagement metric to review is average engagement per social media post.

This is the average number of interactions per follower for each post on the top 5 social networks Rival IQ tracks. This gives you a percentage of your audience engaged overall and levels the playing field a bit.

While competitors with larger audiences are dominating in total engagement, competitors with smaller audiences are dominating in terms of a higher average engagement per post.

Reality is very few organizations even reach a 1% engagement rate overall, and we can see even the highest engagement rate per post is about 0.25%.

3. A third metric is type of engagement on a single network.

One thing that is hard to tell through nearly all tools is the response rate of your competitors, or how often your competitors actually reply to social comments. However, Rival IQ does this especially well on Twitter.

Here you can not only evaluate the level of activity, but what type of social communicator each company is. For example, some are mostly just tweeting out, or broadcasting their social posts to their follower base. Some are amplifying content by retweeting other people’s posts. And finally, the really interesting data is the replies, because you can see who is really engaging in conversation. In the chart above, you can see that Presta Shop, Shopify, WooCommerce and Bigcommerce are all conversationalists on Twitter.

From this engagement data you can decide what you need to accomplish to win in this market.

Step 5:  Position Yourself to Attract Your Ideal Audience

How do your competitors attract their ideal audience to their social profiles? A lot has to do with positioning.

When people visit a page or profile for the first time, they want to know a little about the company before they like or follow. If you want to find out how your competitors position themselves on social media, you can do it the hard way by going to each of their pages and profiles to look at their bios and descriptions.

In Rival IQ’s Social Cross Channel Detailed Metrics, you’ll find all of your competitors’ bios by network. To get some inspiration for a short bio, you can look at their Twitter bios that are 160 characters or less. You can see here few of the companies are optimizing the 160 available characters, so this provides an opportunity for you!

If you want to see a more detailed description, you can look at their Google+ overviews.

Reviewing these bios will show you whether your competitors can attract audiences by marketing their company, or whether they focus on highlighting what they do on social media with their bios and descriptions. You can also continue to monitor changes to their bios and be alerted to any updates they make – so you can be the source of competitive intelligence and decide whether that should lead to an update of your own positioning.

Step 6: Get Connected to the Top Influencers

One of the ways companies get a great engagement is by networking with top influencers in their industry. Even if the influencer is not a customer, they may be likely to engage in conversation or share great content if it is relevant to their audience.

One way to find out who the top influencers are in your industry, who would be likely to engage with your company, is to look at those that engage with your competitors.

Rival IQ has a few different reports to help you identify these influencers. In the Twitter section, you will find the Top Mentioners chart that lists the influencers and the competitors they mention.

The cool thing about this is you can start following key market influencers straight from the tool without having to go into Twitter and disrupt your workflow.

Follow Twitter accounts you know are influential in your market straight from Rival IQ

Then there’s the Mentions chart that shows the top mentions of your competitors. This chart will show you whether influencers are engaging in conversation, sharing content, or simply mentioning your competitors in tweets.

You can sort the mentions by influencer reach, positive sentiment, and negative sentiment. The latter can be useful for those that want to preview both the good and the bad when it comes to social media engagement.

You can click the View on Twitter link for any mention to see the full conversation, including how your competitors respond. It’s a great option for companies that are learning how to engage on social media, especially with key influencers.

Step 7: Go Where Your Competitors Don’t

While the top five social networks are a great place to start to build your social media engagement, they shouldn’t be the end all of your engagement strategy.

Once you’ve built a solid foundation on the networks your competitors are successful upon, branch out to the ones they do not use as often. You’ll either find that there was no engagement opportunity there in the first place, or you’ll find an audience that has been neglected. You may even find the opportunity to promote yourself and your business.

To find these networks, set up a simple Google Alert [2] for your competitors brand names and products. You’ll likely find networks like Quora [3], as well as other niche social networks, forums, and communities.

Start Rocking Social Engagement Today!

By taking the time to research your competitors on social media, you will discover what social networks to choose, how to position yourself, and who to connect in order to boost social engagement for your business. Be sure to sign up for a free trial of Rival IQ to learn how the platform can help you discover engagement opportunities for your business.

The post How to Increase Social Media Engagement using Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.

Overall Look & Feel

If your business doesn’t have the time or the budget to invest in a web design that might not do the job, you can relax. Chances are, your larger competitors do have the ability to invest in the research it takes to find the perfect design for maximum conversions. All you have to do is monitor their moves and the best design is likely to be revealed.

Let’s take Sprout Social, the robust social CRM tool for business. Rival IQ picked up changes to their web design in early 2013.

These changes were not minor – and any social media tool for business would be wise to note the key updates they have made. Just by browsing the thumbnails, you can see that the new look and feel is much cleaner with less text and larger images. Now, let’s dig deeper.

New Products, Services, and Features

The first thing you may want to find out when a competitor updates their website is whether they are offering new products or services, or if they have made significant changes to their existing products and services.

One of the things you will notice immediately about the opening of the features page is the difference in text. Before, there was a lot to read. The main tagline on the product focused on design and user experience.

In the new design, most of the opening text has gone away, and the main tagline focus on the power of their product.

Before, there was again a heavy emphasis on text on the page, particularly bullet point lists. The top three features they focused on were the dashboard, monitoring, and analytics.

After, the text has gone away and the top features highlighted are the ones that most people will be interested in: engagement, publishing, monitoring, and analytics. They also specify that all plans include the main features listed.

You can click through to each to learn more, just as you could on the previous design. Even the individual features pages now have a more streamlined look with less text and a larger image emphasis at the top.

Pricing

Since the pricing page is where your main conversions happen, it’s especially important to anazlye the changes to it. In Sprout Social’s case, the before look included a darker theme and the pricing order was from highest to lowest.

In the new look, the pricing goes from lowest to highest and the text about the features in each level changed slightly. They also changed the wording of downgrade to change.

Beneath the pricing table, they previously listed the social networks they work with. In the new look, they instead note the fact that all plans include free personal accounts for paid team members and mobile apps.

They also modified the look of their FAQ below the pricing options. Before, the section felt a little more cluttered with the questions on the left, logos of brands they worked with on the right.

After, the look is cleaner and the testimonials are in place of the logos.

Conversion Testing & Strategy

Chances are, Sprout Social did some heavy A/B testing to determine the best ways to design their call to action buttons to increase free trial signups. Overall, the reduced amount of text on the main pages make it easier to recognize the call to action buttons without the need to make them boldly colored, something you may have noticed on the homepage and throughout the site. Here is the homepage before.

And here it is after with a more mute, yet still obvious call to action.

Another area you may note changes to are the navigation bar. Before, there was a steady log in and sign up button at the top right. After, the navigation bar changes from just showing to the log in button to showing a bold free trial button as you scroll down the page.

It’s a perfect change as people are more likely to want to sign up for a free trial as they scroll down the pages on the site to learn more. Having the button appear while the page is moving makes it more eye-catching.

Trust Factors

Trust factors are the elements that help a potential customer feel more confident in their decision to buy from your business. Before on the Sprout Social site, they were only found on the homepage.

It was missing on other key pages such as the pricing page and the product features page. In the new look, however, they implemented them into the footer to be displayed on all pages throughout the site.

They also lessened the chance that people would click on the links to the Twitter and Facebook development centers in this change. While the links are still there in the new footer design, they are less obvious to click on than the badges in the previous design. This will prevent people from leaving the Sprout Social site and potentially discovering one of their competitor’s in the developers directories, especially on Twitter’s page where you are greeted with Adobe Social, HootSuite, and other products before you get to Sprout Social’s listing.

They also added more video testimonials from the brands they work with on their customer’s page. Before, you could only see the main video, followed by a call to action. After brand logos, you would then find additional testimonial videos.

After, you can see three videos, directly followed by logos of brands using their product.

The testimonials also stand out more in the new look.

Copy

The above points are just the things you can notice at a glance while going through a competitor’s website redesign. When you’re going through website changes manually, it can be difficult to note the more minute copy changes that have happened beyond headers and call to action buttons. This is where Rival IQ can make your life simpler by highlighting these changes.

With our tool, you can find out if your competitors are just making over their layout or if their copy has been modified as well. You can also find out if your competitors have made any changes under the hood. For example, Sprout Social did not change any of their search optimization tags like the page titles or meta descriptions. Another popular internet marketing tool, Raven Tools, did.

Considering the importance of the copy used on a homepage’s key on-site search optimization tags in relation to how a website appears in search, being able to see these changes when they happen can be vital in on-going competitor research.

Key Takeaways

So what have you learned from taking a walk through of this social media tool’s website change?

• Less text can make your calls to action stand out.
• Allow people to quickly see your product top features without having to read too many details.
• Trust factors should be on every page you have a call to action.
• Small changes in copy can make a large difference.
• Remove options for people to leave your site as much as possible to increase conversions.

What did you learn about the redesign, and how can you see Rival IQ’s tool helping you monitor competitor’s website design changes? Please share in the comments! Also, be sure to sign up for Rival IQ to research your competitors – the first 14 days are free !

The post Reverse Engineering a Website Redesign for Competitor Research appeared first on Rival IQ.