You might be skipping one of the most important steps to
building a social media strategy.
I say that because I certainly did for years, and what I'm talking
about is a competitor analysis.
This is also known as just spying on brands that are similar to yours
to help you decide what to do.
And what not to do with your own social media accounts.
This can be extremely helpful whether you're working with a client or you're
working on your own social media strategy.
Looking at what other people have done and experimented with can save
you so much time, give you new ideas, and help you do better at your job.
So before I get into showing you how to actually build a competitor analysis
report and start spying on those brands, let's talk about where to actually find
your competitors first, because this is the first thing that you've got to answer.
What other brands are similar to us?
Who should we be taking inspiration from and who should we not
be taking inspiration from?
One of the first things I like to do is go to my audience.
If you have any existing following already, or if your client does.
Post an Instagram story, post a sticker and just say, Hey,
what other brands do you follow?
What other companies do you buy from that are in your niche?
And hearing from your customers directly is going to be such
a valuable resource for you.
You're going to actually be able to hear in their own words,
why they follow these brands.
And you're probably going to hear.
about brands that you've never even heard of before.
This is certainly what's happened to me when I've done something similar.
Of course, don't leave it just to Instagram.
Go wherever your audience is, make a post, make a Tik TOK, go live,
whatever it takes to get in a virtual room with your existing audience.
Super valuable.
Now, another thing that you can Googling.
Or searching on TOK, or any platform that you're active on for your
keyword or for any descriptors of what your service or product is, is
going to also be really helpful here.
Again, you're going to see brands that you probably didn't even know
existed that offer something similar to you and that are ranking for
keywords that you also are ranking for.
Do a little bit of digging, click on their websites, click on their social
profiles, get to know them a little bit.
And if it seems like they're a brand that has a decent following, decent
engagement, jot them down onto a list.
From there, I recommend using a tool like my fave Metricool.
Metricool is my favorite all in one social media platform.
I talk about it all the time.
You all know that I love it.
One of the things that it can do in addition to scheduling and analytics
is help you do competitor analysis.
So let's hop over to the computer.
I'll show you exactly how it's done.
And of course, if you want to give Metricool a try, it's free to get started.
But if you want to upgrade to one of their pro plans, you can get 30 days free.
Using my code LaTosha and also leave the link down below to get started
building your list of competitors.
You'll want to first click on the analytics tab, and from there you
will choose the platform on the left hand side of the screen that you want
to build a competitor list for now.
The competitor feature in metrical is available at the time of
recording this for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
Let's go ahead and start with Instagram.
There are a couple of ways that you can get to the competitors section.
You can either click on this tab here up at the top, or you can just scroll
all the way down and you'll see, I do not yet have my competitors populated.
So let's just click on add.
I'm going to choose a few other kind of online education platforms username.
We'll go ahead and add.
Super high and I love creatives.
So as you can see, the information populates pretty much immediately.
We get a list here of the total followers.
We get how many posts that they have made over this specific time period.
How many reels.
What their average likes are per post, average comments
per post and engagement rate.
And as we can see here, it looks like the future is really leading the pack.
It looks like they post a lot of content and their engagement
rate is pretty strong too.
Although we can see that I love creatives actually has the highest engagement rate.
So we might want to take a look at what I love creatives
is posting on their Instagram.
Why is it so engaging?
What about it is so engaging?
And is there anything that we can leverage and learn for our own
platform that maybe we want to adopt?
We'll click on more stats.
I just want to see what else we can see here.
So we can actually get this nice report.
This is one of my favorite things about Metro cool is their reporting features.
And this is just really beautifully displayed here.
In this case, I love creatives has grown followers.
They've decreased their posting frequency and decrease the amount of reels.
That they're posting as well.
Their engagement rate is a little bit down.
Likes are down, kind of everything's a little bit down.
Something helpful about this is I know in social media, we kind of go through
seasons, particularly during the summer time, which this is actually a report
basically clovering the entire summer.
And so if you're ever feeling like, you know, your clients accounts are
really down in terms of engagement likes, pull up a competitor's report
and see if other people are too.
Oftentimes you will find it is a seasonality thing.
You will find it depends on time of year, maybe other events that are going on
in your space or in the world at large.
We also have a list of their posts here, and we can sort this by engagement rate.
I want to see their most engaged with posts.
I'm going to go ahead and click on view and see, let's look at the next few.
So this is, it looks like it is kind of a freebie if I'm not mistaken, a lead magnet
or a freebie, a behind the scenes look at what it is really like to be a copywriter.
I'll look at one more here.
This is a, an internet gem roundup.
This one is actually tagging other people and showing portfolios that they
thought were attractive and well done.
This is something that I absolutely could replicate, Hey, social media
managers, send me your portfolios.
And I'm going to create a roundup of some of my favorites, some of
the ones that people can learn from.
So these are all.
Great ideas, great ways to just kind of get your brain thinking
a little bit on the flip side.
I want to go ahead and actually look at their least engaged posts
just to see, is there anything that we really shouldn't do?
This is kind of a promotional testimonial.
It's beautifully designed, of course, but maybe I can just keep that in mind.
Not to say that we'll never post testimonials of our courses, but just
kind of knowing that that might not be.
The hottest seller.
This is a promotional post.
So it's for something that they are selling.
Now, again, I think this post is really beautifully done.
So it's not to say that they did anything wrong, but typically when you are really
selling something, those can sometimes get you a little bit less engagement
and responses than you might like.
And sometimes it's not even a bad thing.
Sometimes it means people see it and they instantly click on the
profile, go to the LinkedIn profile.
and want to purchase it.
Okay.
Let's close out of this for a second.
Now that was just looking at one brand, but if you actually click on post list,
all this will let you do basically what I just did, but for all of those accounts
that I added into my competitor list.
And did I mention that you can add up to 100 competitors on the premium plan?
And if you want to stick to the free plan, you can add up to five competitors.
So.
Either way, lots of options.
So again, I can do the same thing.
It looks like the future is really dominating here on the front page.
Let's see what their top engaged post was.
It is a real.
And it is about, uh, looks like how to make more money kind of as a
freelancer or as a designer, we've got another real more about money.
Right?
So again, what can I learn from that?
Can I do more money talk for freelancers, particularly if it's a real.
And we'll do one final one, which is money, more money.
So really interesting to see those themes.
You see how we're seeing some parallels.
And of course, I'm not going to copy exactly what he's doing, but I may want
to just kind of have these reels in mind when I'm creating my next ones.
You can also download a CSV of this report and you can customize the
columns that you're looking at.
So maybe if I didn't care about likes or comments or how many reels they posted,
I could, you know, customize that.
And then I also love the compare feature.
Clicking on this will enable you to select the brands that you'd like to compare.
So maybe I want to do the future compared against super high and I want
to leave I Love Creatives out of it.
We'll click on compare and this will give us just our selected competitors
and allow us to see just those two neck to neck against each other.
So you can really get creative with this, especially if you have You know,
you're maxing out your competitors.
Sometimes you just wanna look at the top two or three competitors
or the closest competitors.
So this enables you to do that.
And of course you can download the C S V as well.
And like I said, you can do this for Twitter or X as well as Facebook
and YouTube, which is pretty cool.
We'll go down to competitors and let me just add a few in here.
Just to show you what it shows you.
So let's do the future since they seem to really be crushing it.
We'll do the future.
Who else?
Maybe we'll do Flux Academy.
It's another online education platform.
We'll just go ahead with those two.
Those are the only two I can think of off the top of my head here.
But it'll show you the total number of subscribers, total number of views.
I think this is just for this period of time.
Let's do 30 days.
Oh no, this is overall actually total views overall.
I switched the date range just to the past 30 days.
So they've uploaded 29 videos in 30 days.
Flux has uploaded 33.
This is really interesting for me as a YouTuber because I'm realizing, wow, I
need to really get my stuff in order.
I guess I thought I was doing good with one to three videos a week.
Maybe I need to be uploading daily.
I am sure some of those are shorts, but I should be posting daily shorts, right?
That's what they're doing.
And they are crushing it.
The total number of likes that they've gotten and dislikes is actually
not, uh, it doesn't show anymore.
So I'm doubtful that they truly get zero dislikes.
But there is zero visible dislikes.
And then this is how many comments they're getting on average per video.
I'm actually going to remove the dislikes column from this view.
Since, like I said, it isn't really applicable.
We'll go ahead and click on the video list and I'm going to sort by, I'm
going to sort by most video views.
So it looks like Flex Academy is crushing it.
Reacting to 21 design portfolios in 22 minutes.
That is a really fun video idea.
Again, maybe I can borrow that reacting to social media management portfolios.
Next up is.
I've done a video like this before, so I can easily redo a video like this again,
how to use LinkedIn to get more clients.
So this is just such a great idea for me to take to the drawing board when
it comes to next month's video ideas.
And, uh, maybe, maybe replicate some of these ideas.
So now that you have all this information, what do you do with it?
Well, again, if you're working with a client, I definitely
recommend presenting this to them.
I hear all the time from students and friends, Hey, I can't convince
my client to show their face on Instagram, or I can't convince
my client to start a Tik TOK.
They feel like it's not relevant for us.
Sometimes just showing them what their competitors are doing is
enough to push them over the edge.
Business owners, and I say this.
With, with love, because I'm also a business owner, we kind of
deal with this FOMO thing, right?
We don't want to be the only ones who aren't doing a particular thing.
So if you show them that all of their competitors are posting on Instagram
three times a week, and they're only posting once, or that some of their
other competitors are, you know, posting face to camera, you know, live
action type stuff, and they're not, they're only posting text based posts.
That is likely something that can convince them to at least.
Test your new strategy that is more in line with what
they should really be doing.
And of course, if this is for your own brand, use it as inspiration.
Now, you all know, I do not like a copier and I don't ever recommend
copying anything word for word, picture for picture, but it can give you a
good idea of how often you should be posting, which platforms you should
be focusing on, whether or not your social media strategy is successful.
Or not.
This is another thing that can help with clients too, is benchmarking.
You might feel like your engagement rate is really low, but if you look at
your competitors and you notice that it's actually average compared to your
competitors, well, that can be something important to include in your end of month
reports and also just for you to know.
So you're not beating yourself up over not getting a million likes
on your photos when really most people in your industry are not.
So, remember, don't skip this step.
It is super important and also super easy to do using Metricool.
Hope this video was helpful.
Be sure to give Metricool a try.
I'll leave their link down in the description box.
Use my code LaTosha for 30 days free on any premium plan, and
I'll see you in the next one.
Bye.