While some businesses are obsessed with paid and organic traffic monitoring, one area of market research that is sometimes disregarded is social media.

Competitor analysis is an essential component of digital marketing. Knowing what your competitors are up to allows you to make more informed marketing decisions and better understand your target market.

In this post, we'll discuss why it's vital to monitor social media metrics, what they can indicate about your competitors' methods, and, most significantly, how you can get this valuable data for free.

Importance of social media

Monitoring the social performance of your competitors is beneficial since it exposes what may or may not work for you. Simply watching how audiences react to your competitors' content can help you analyze growth potential across several channels and niches. This enables you to develop a more effective social strategy of your own, resulting in increased audience engagement and brand visibility.

It also informs you about the best practices for content development and output. For example, what type of voice and tone does your shared audience prefer? What kinds of content do they like? Knowing the answers to these kinds of inquiries can help you save a lot of time and money. 

How to gain competitive insights on social media for free? 

Creating and testing social content can take a lot of time and resources. Learning to communicate with your target audience can be a hit-or-miss process that leads to missed chances as you try to find your social media footing.

However, researching your competitors' top-performing content might make your life much easier. By examining the posts that do well for your competitors, you may understand the best practices and then adapt them to your own. You can even look for creative inspiration if you're stuck for ideas. 

Monitoring your competitors' current campaigns offers many advantages, but to remain competitive in the future, you must strive to grasp their long-term strategy.

For example, what growth channels are they aiming for? Where are they attempting to establish a long-term and noticeable presence? This is vital to understand because you should also be if your competitors are present on a specific channel.

Social Media Tracker's comparison function might assist you in answering these questions. In the 'Comparison with competitors' report, for example, we can observe that Mattress Firm has dramatically boosted its Facebook presence, implying that it has discovered growth prospects on that platform.

As previously said, all these reports are free and can save you a significant amount of time. They can provide vital insights into your competitors' social media activities, allowing you to stay one step ahead of them.

You may also receive regular updates on how your competitors act using Social Media Tracker, meaning you only need to configure your report once. To get started, go to the top right corner of the dashboard and select the 'Email reports' tab.

Conclusion

With these strategies and insights, you can now do your competitor analysis and begin to create the framework for your own effective and targeted social media campaign. Whether competing against established industry leaders like this one or local rivals in a smaller niche, these free tools can help you be competitive—and successful—in your battle with the brands.